If you live in a big city and are carrying piece of paper money, you are probably transporting illegal drugs. A team from University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth has found that bills from the US and Canada are highly likely to have trace amounts of cocaine, showing for the first time a growing prevalence in the abuse of the drug.
A worldwide study of bills from over 30 cities in five countries found a startling statistic: “cocaine is present in up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, particularly in large cities such as Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit. The scientists found traces of cocaine in 95 percent of the banknotes analyzed from Washington, D.C., alone.” [EurekAlert] What is intriguing is that a study conducted two years ago showed 67 percent of bills had traces of cocaine. That means there was over a 20 percent jump.
What has happened over the past two years that caused the growth in cocaine-tainted bills? "I'm not sure why we've seen this apparent increase, but it could be related to the economic downturn, with stressed people turning to cocaine," Dr. Yuegang Zuo, lead author of the study, said. [EurekAlert] Zuo hopes his study can help law enforcement agencies better understand the flow and growth of drug use in communities.
234 US bills from 17 cities were investigated. The results showed that “amounts [found on the bills] ranged from .006 micrograms (several thousands of times smaller than a single grain of sand) to over 1,240 micrograms of cocaine per banknote (about 50 grains of sand).” [EurekAlert] How the drug gets on the bills is well-understood. Money changes hand during a drug deal (of course), but bills are also used in the consumption of cocaine as the drug can be rolled into a bill and snorted. The city with the greatest chance of finding traces of the drug was DC. Salt Lake City bills were the least likely to be contaminated.
Stating that 90 percent of all bills in the US—even those that stay out of circulation in large cities—are carriers of cocaine is most likely an overstatement. But using the technique to do a comparison study between cities is a unique way to understand the rise and fall of drug use. Zuo utilized a modified form of a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer which allowed him to study bills more accurately as well as leave the bills themselves intact.
And what of the other countries studied? Canadian bills came back at 85% contamination while Brazil’s banknotes registered at 80%. China and Japan had the lowest levels, with China at 20 percent and Japan at 12 percent (though only 16 bills were studied from Japan).
Despite the high incidence level in the US, researchers do not think there is a health concern among the general public when handling the bills."For the most part, you can't get high by sniffing a regular banknote, unless it was used directly in drug uptake or during a drug exchange," Zuo said. "It also won't affect your health and is unlikely interfere with blood and urine tests used for drug detection." [EurekAlert]
This research was presented at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Comments
the ignorance of mathematics and drug culture in this article is impressive. did you ever go to school?
Do they teach drug culture in schools now? I must have missed the introduction of that curriculum.
And making snotty comments really helps boost your credibility as a so-called journalist.
She's right. You have to be humble and appropriate. Your posts should reflect the level of dignity and intelligence that Miss Manners does.
Oh, wait... strike that. Miss Manners post seems sort of curt and snippy, and includes an adjective unbecoming of such a proper modern lady. That doesn't really boost her credibility as a reliable source of behavioral criticism.
Hurrah! She gets points for contradiction.
And, towards Senator Junkie Einstein, perhaps a little more time in school-proper instead of your devoted study to 'drug culture' between classes would have taught you that when creating a point of contention, it helps to actually -include- a point of contention, rather than stating what you believe to be fact and leaving us to take it at face value. As it is, I can take the word of someone who in their title claims to be a junkie, or I can take the word of an article which frequently references an article about the American Chemistry Society.
Do you see my dilemm
Do people actually use money to snort it? Far as I know most people use plastic straws or bumps off keys or pen caps. Money is pretty unsanitary, why the hell would you put money in your nose? Eww.
* - continued
Do you not see my dilemma?
I wonder why examiner's posting mechanism cut me off early when it said I had characters to spare.
- Craig: I'd never heard of anything like that either. It is a bit unnerving, but I suppose at times that is all that is handy.
We have a money supply of trillions of dollars, and this study only looked at 237 bills? This findings are not mathematically significant.
234 bills from 17 cities... what's the margin of error for that again? The only thing to be learned from that study is not to trust surveys coming from the University of Massachusetts because their statistics course is clearly taught by a monkey!
Perhaps just a jump in cocaine use among bankers?
My drug dealer now takes pay pal. As more and more drug dealers get on the Internet bandwagon, this sort of problem should diminish.
@ ventajou & Jonathan
Calculating the margin of error for cases where the sample size is very small relative to the total population (e.g. ten bills out of all of the ones in circulation) is simple. standard error = (p(1-p)/n) ^ 0.5. A 95% confidence margin of error is simply 1.96* (standard error)
With 234 bills from 17 cities, if we assume the same number of bills from each city we get about 13.7 bills per city. Rounding down to 13 gives a conservative estimate. The standard error for a city with a cocaine rate of 90% is about 8.3%, the margin of error is 16.27%. The standard error for the national average of 90% is about 2.0%, the margin of error is 3.92%.
So, with such a small sample size, the per-city numbers may be quite wrong, but that national average tells us that there is a lot of blow in our money.
I'm sure that original paper had all the details of statistical significance tests and whatnot, but I don't see link.
The only statistic of any possible importance would be the number of bills out of the 237 tested which showed cocaine contamination. Far too few bills where tested in total, forget actually trying to narrow the study by location.
While I do find it interesting that some of the money in my wallet may have trace amounts of cocaine, it would require a proper study with sufficient amounts of test bills to peak any real interest.
Dooh! How about those bill counters at banks? anyone test those for traces of cocaine? All you need is a batch with cocaine on it to run through and then everything after it is contaminated.
Beyond the problems with the sample size that have already been addressed, there is also the fact that this statistic is pretty meaningless and can't really be used to indicate any change in drug use.
Cocaine is an extremely fine powder, and as such is easily transferable from surface to surface. One bill contaminated cocaine could contaminate a wallet full of bills, or a cash register. When you factor in that businesses often use counting machines that quickly shuffle bills the chances of cross contamination increase even more so.
While the 90% figure is a fun fact (albeit a dubious one, given the small sample size in the study), it can not be accurately said to convene anything about drug use in America.
Ack! Meant to say "convey" in the last sentence there. How embarrassing.
The Federal Reserve and it's bank notes already had a devalued
reputation. You know, Neel Kashkari etc. The conclusion of this study
is however very weird. One might even conclude that anyone carrying
Cash must be a Coke sniffer. It's no secret anymore that the hidden
rulers want to have a Cash-less society. The story here certainly helps
in fulfilling this objective. We just need to take care that besides
the vanishing of Cash from our Society, our Society itself doesn't
disappear as well.
Robert
--
Robert M. Stockmann - RHCE
Network Engineer - UNIX/Linux Specialist
crashrecovery.org stock@stokkie.net
Only 234 bills tested in the U.S., and they claim to have the statistics for the entire country? Methinks they are full of something foul. Furthermore, this year's test is more sensitive than the one they did 2 years ago. Of course they'll find more of ANY chemical. This is a meaningless hype article.
I recommend not taking any US currency with you on trips to Dubai or other middle-eastern countries. You will go to jail for a very long time for the microscopic particles of coke on your money. I'm not joking either. Just a warning.
Tests only about 14 bills/city? Ignores composition differences between US & foreign notes. USA uses cotton cloth and Aussies uses plastic, for example. Japan seems to use washi made from Misumata shrubs. Also doesn't consider cross-contamination caused by automated bill counters.
oi. Meg, you've stirred the pot again! Love you for it! <3 Snarky comments, my friends, are what journalism is. Most of the time's it's veiled through vocal tones however. Actually LISTEN to the news sometime. Not just the words, but the tone. It's not so neutral.
Law enforcement understands this problem clearly, and uses this to entrap the public. Anyone traveling with cash can be accused of drug dealing, money laundering, and more by having drug dogs sniff your cash. When the dogs alert to the presence of drugs, your cash and often your car and other property are confiscated. Often there is no arrest made, citizens are just parted from their valuables. Most are forced to walk away from their money since they are unwilling to open the can of worms that includes huge legal fees and possible arrest and prosecution for drug crimes. This has been going on for years, and is now a popular income source to many law enforcement agencies across America.
Thanks for an eye-opening article.
Dennis
North American Destinations Examiner
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