NEW ORLEANS -- Micro-dosing is a technique whereby professional endurance athletes -- Tour de France cyclists, Olympic marathoners and the like -- try to avoid getting caught using drugs, and it has something to tell us about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The radio airwaves here on the edge of the Louisiana bayous reverberate every day now with concerns about "the oil'' getting in "the food chain.''

The oil is, of course, the crude the Deepwater accident is still gushing all over the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles off the southern Gulf Coast. By now the uncapped geyser left spewing 5,000-feet deep on the seabed after the explosion and fire that sank the Deepwater, killing 11, has sent upward of 2 million to 3 million gallons of crude oil to blacken the surface of the ocean.

The "food chain" is, of course, that complex web of life which we sit atop. More specifically, in this particular case, it is the oil-eating bacteria that are eaten by dinoflagellates that are eaten by copepods that eaten by euphausids that are eaten by shrimp, which are to people in Louisiana what salmon are to people in Alaska.

Nothing seems to freak out a Cajun more than the idea that oil might get in his'n or her'n shrimp, and because of that all that oil floating in the Gulf has a lot of people scared because it looks bad. That and because the media, which no one in this country seems to believe anymore unless a disaster strikes, keeps saying it is bad.

It is bad, too. There is going to be environmental fallout from this mega-dosing event for decades, but as far as the food chain is concerned, it is really nothing.

The Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection in 1993 took a shot at estimating the volume of hydrocarbons going into the marine food chain on an annual basis, and the number they came up with makes the Horizon spill look insignificant.

The total? 2.3 million tons or about 16.1 million barrels or, to finally get it into numbers comparable to those here, 676 million gallons per year.

That's right, 676 million gallons per year.

Where does it come from? Well, sad to say, most of it comes from you and me. The GESAMP estimated that 50 percent of the various oil derivatives, or about 338 million gallons per year, come in small part from the refineries that produce the gas people put in their cars and the oil they use to heat their homes, and in large part from urban runoff. This would be the gas you spill when refilling at the service stations. The oil that leaks out of your car. The old fuel your irresponsible neighbor dumps in his driveway. The hydrocarbons that come out of the noisy, inefficient, two-cycle grass blower you use because you are too lazy to rake. Those hydrocarbons settle to the ground to be washed away and become runoff pollution.

Alaskans should be somewhat familiar with this problem. There was such a volume of hydrocarbons from old-fashioned two-cycle engines polluting the Kenai River that the engines were banned. The only engines now legal on the Kenai are high-tech, cleaner burning two-cycles and four-cycles. The Kenai, it should be noted, also continues to collect a high volume of hydrocarbon runoff from traffic, but cars have not been banned near the watershed.

Nor have they been banned here in Louisiana or nearby Mississippi or Alabama or Florida where the volume of traffic makes the Sterling Highway in Kenai look like a one-lane country road. Same for the waters along the coast where the small boat traffic not only makes the busiest day on the Kenai River look like nothing, but where there is a constantly shifting flotilla of tankers and cargo ships scuttling back and forth to several major seaports, spilling and dumping oil.

Not to mention the fishing boats. More than one commercial fisherman, in fact, when asked "Have you smelled any oil?'' answered something to the effect of, "I thought I did, but it could just have been someone pumping their bilges.''