Dirty Money

What's in your wallet? Unhindered by Talent/flickr

Thursday, August 20th, 2009--

Most of us would deny any connection to drug money, but if we take the term literally as money that contains traces of drugs, all of us are guilty of possession.

Ninety percent of the paper money in circulation in the U.S. contains traces of cocaine, according to a study by Yuegang Zou a chemist at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. That’s up from 67 percent, as measured by Zou in a similar 2007 study.

A bill does not have to be directly used for snorting the drug to show traces of cocaine. Currency counters at banks are probably where most of the contamination happens, as drug particles spread from bill to bill, but studies like Zou’s can be used as benchmarks to measure general cocaine use across a society.

Zuo was surprised to see such a large increase, but speculates that “it could be related to the economic downturn, with stressed people turning to cocaine.”

-Erik Ortlip