There’s Cocaine in those Bills – Currency that Is

Interesting story here about the amount of cocaine floating around these days, not enough to cause any health hard and I am guessing too no enough to get a buzz. The ATM machines even pass it on to other clean bills. It seems like the busier and bigger the city, the more cocaine that is found. Cash is still grand and spends well, cocaine dust and all. You do wonder what else is floating around on the bills since we have all heard that money is dirty and to wash your hands, so in short I guess we all deal with dirty money today. (grin) One other item that is a bit frightening is the fact that gee, there must still be a lot of cocaine still floating around today too. BD

In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue.

Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.

"When the machine gets contaminated, it transfers the cocaine to the other bank notes," Zuo said. These bills have fewer remnants of cocaine. Some of the dollars in his experiment had .006 micrograms, which is several thousands of times smaller than a single grain of sand.

In his study, the rate of drug-contaminated money varied geographically from urban to less populated areas. A hundred percent of the sample bills collected from major cities such as Miami, Florida; Boston, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan, tested positive for cocaine, but samples collected from smaller cities such as Salt Lake City, Utah; Niagara Falls, New York;and Dearborn, Michigan, had 87 to 67 percent.