Cocaine is all over your cash
There is good reason why it is considered improper etiquette to snort cocaine with a rolled up banknote. We’ve all heard about how dirty money can be – one study showed that 94% of all bills tested contained disease causing organisms like staphylococcus areus and bacteria that can bring on pneumonia. Now it is known that something else is joining forces with such nefarious microscopic entities on nearly all money circulated in the U.S and Canada – old ass cocaine.
Professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Yuegang Zuo presented a study earlier this week showing that 90% of the bills he tested from 17 different cities in the U.S contained trace amounts of cocaine. Banknotes collected from Canada, mainly around the Toronto area were not far behind with 85% testing positive.
In a separate study The Tennessean just released, by the U.S office of National Drug Control Policy, bills taken from 18 different U.S. cities of their choosing also contained grains of cocaine on 90% of the samples.
It turns out that cocaine bonds to a green dye printed on cash, and the most plausible reason for such a high frequency of contamination is by way of diffusion. Only a few bills find the fate of blasting cocaine up someone’s willing nose but those few are then mixed up with other bills in ATM’s and currency counters where it spreads infectiously. Adam Negrusz, an associate professor of forensic sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago reached these conclusions back in 1998 and even then found cocaine on 100% of the bills he tested from the largest cities in the U.S.
The consistency in the numbers from all these studies not only reiterates why you shouldn’t use a bill to toot up some powder but more importantly, it demonstrates how pervasive a controlled substance can be even in the invisible world beyond our senses.
[CNN]
