# How much cash would you have to snort?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-cash-would-you-have-to-snort/508401>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [August 31, 2009, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-cash-would-you-have-to-snort/508401 "2009-08-31T20:23:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![taddvc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@taddvc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/taddvc)\
**Post date:** [August 31, 2009, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-cash-would-you-have-to-snort/508401/1 "2009-08-31T20:23:07Z")

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Since 90% of U.S. currency contains trace amounts of cocaine, how many notes would you have to snort to get high?

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**Author:** ![The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3ec8ea/32.png) [@The\_Great\_Philosopher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Great_Philosopher)\
**Post date:** [August 31, 2009, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-cash-would-you-have-to-snort/508401/2 "2009-08-31T20:45:41Z")

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The trace amounts of cocaine bind to the green ink on the bills, so you wouldn’t be able to snort it. Nevertheless, this article quotes an amount:

> [@](#):
>
> [http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/14/cocaine.traces.money/](http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/14/cocaine.traces.money/)
> 
> …Some of the dollars in his experiment had .006 micrograms, which is several thousands of times smaller than a single grain of sand.

So if we say there’s 10 lines in a gram, making one line 0.1 grams, and there’s 0.006 micrograms of cocaine on the note, you’d have to snort 16,666,666 notes to get one line of coke. Admittedly I think that amount is one of the smaller amounts of cocaine detected on the bank notes, so maybe if you got a few large amounts it would be higher, but I don’t think it’s going to make that much difference to be honest…!