The statistic I’ve heard is that something like 70% of all American money has trace amounts of cocaine present.
The question(s) I have:
[ul]Is this an urban legend, or the real deal? How do they know this?[/ul]
[ul]Is it just paper money, or are coins equally contaminated?[/ul]
[ul]How/why does this occur? Is this cross-contamination?[/ul]
Yes, it’s true.
Also, 70% of statistics are made up.
Snopes says it’s true.
It’s true, but I forget where I read it (not in a work of fiction.) A suspected cocaine dealer was on trial, and the only evidence was a cache of money. Most of the money tested positive for cocaine. The defense attorney got a bunch of big bills from banks and had it tested. Most of it came up positive for cocaine. The case was thrown out. This was big bills, and no coins.
Why? First, coke dealers tend to count money on the same table where they divvy up and cut the drug. Second, money’s paper, and it always contains a little moisture. When the moist paper contacts the water-soluble drug, it gloms onto the fibers and stays there for a long time. Third, drug dealing is conducted entirely in cash, so lots of $100 bills are handled by drug-coated hands. Fourth, coke users (reportedly) like to snort the drug through a rolled up bill.
Is this the reason my mom always told me not to put money in my mouth?
When we mean trace, I suppose we mean, “so ridicuously small that only a trial lawyer would be concerned with it” and not, “dude, if you take all of your cash and ring it out, you can get like a gram of coke out of it.”
It’s about the same here in sunny London. In my part of London it is far from unusual to be given a bank note in change that has very obviously been rolled up in the recent past - particularly in pubs and bars.
Mind you this is South West London we’re talking about - home of the coked up hooray.
Yes, we do. It’s enough that we can reliably detect it (spectroscopically, I assume) on a large majority of bills, but not enough that you could reasonably get high from eating or otherwise using the bills.
Of course, bills can contaminate bills. If you have one bill in your wallet that contains trace amounts of cocaine, soon all of the bills in your wallet will have a certain amount of the alkaloid. And since we can apparently detect it in very, very small concentrations, even the barest trace can be called `detectable’.
I think Snopes got it wrong, they should have said the claim was possibly true.
The article itself said: “How widespread is the contamination? No one appears to have the definitive answer, as every study comes up with a different percentage.”
The so-called stuides show much diffierent results and there is no evidence presented to show that the sub-population of bills being studied is representive of the entire money supply.
Were these samples truly random or merely haphazard. If haphazard, the only conclusions that could be reached would be about the charateristics of the sample itself, not the population said sample supposedly represented. And again, why should we believe $1 bills in some Chicago suburb be the same(or different) relative to cocaine than the entire money supply?
Your ma was probably concerned about dirt and germs. Money is universally handled by people’s bare hands, and it hardly ever gets washed. Your coins, and especially your bills, bear the bacteria from the last dozen or so people who handled it.
Is this the reason my mom always told me not to put money in my mouth?
Due to the use of paper money for cash only transactions it has alot of nasty stuff on it. Any gent or lady who has been to an adult dancing entertainment establishment can vouch that alot of paper money does not necessarily stay in the nicest environments.
Plus how many other people have put a specific bill in their mouths? Ever have a friend stash his bills in his sock/shoe or her bills in her bra? At the minimum have you ever seen paper bills laying on a semi-moist standard bar top at the local pub/tavern. Yeach…