Washington – Cocaine Residue on Your Cash

Washington – A new study found that almost all the bank notes in circulation in this country are contaminated with cocaine.

An average of about 85% of US greenbacks had traces of the drug – up 20% since the same team did a similar study two years ago.

“To my surprise, we’re finding more and more cocaine in banknotes,” said Dr. Yuegang Zuo, who led the researchers at the University of Massachusetts.

“It could be related to the economic downturn, with stressed people turning to cocaine.”

Bills become drug money when users snort the powder through rolled up notes, or handle bills with powder-coated hands. Grains of cocaine then transfer to clean bills in pockets, wallets and bank counting machines across the country.

Zuo presented his findings Monday at the biannual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. – the city that ranked highest in the survey for coke contamination.

Fully 95% of the Washington bills sampled had cocaine on them. Of the 17 US cities tested, clean-living Salt Lake City had the lowest levels of contamination.

New York was not tested.

Levels of cocaine found ranged from .006 micrograms to 1,240 micrograms, or the equivalent of about 50 grains of sand. (That means you’d need 800 of the very dirtiest bills to extract a gram of coke, which has a street price of about $80.)

“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 in a release from the American Chemical Society.

“It also won’t affect your health and is unlikely interfere with blood and urine tests used for drug detection.”

Five dollar, $10 and $20 bills tended to be more contaminated than $1 or $100 bills.

The researchers also looked at money from Brazil, Canada, China and Japan, and found just 20% of Chinese renminbi notes and only 12% of Japanese yen notes had coke on them.

The Canadians and Brazilians were at US levels: 85% and 80% respectively.

A 2007 federal drug use survey found 36 million Americans – or 14.5% of the population – had tried cocaine at least once. About 2.1 million – 0.8% of the population – had used it in the past month.

The government estimates that Americans spend up to $77 billion annually on 300 metric tons of the drug.

A German study in 2006 searched the Hudson River for by-products of human cocaine consumption and extrapolated that New Yorkers consume 16.4 tons a year.

A study published last year in Trends in Analytical Chemistry comparing cocaine levels on banknotes in different countries found that U.S. notes were the most tainted.

In Europe, Spanish Euro notes were the most contaminated, carrying five times the amount of cocaine as Euro notes circulating in Germany. Irish Euros were the cleanest in that study, though a year before, Irish authorities reported finding coke on 100% of the 45 bills they tested.