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Up To 90 Percent of US Money Has Traces of Cocaine
mmmscience writes "Scientists have found that up to 90% of US paper money has some cocaine contamination, up from the 67% mark measured two years ago. Looking at bills from 17 cities, it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive. From a global standpoint, both Canada and Brazil tested rather high (85% and 80%, respectively), but China and Japan were well behind the curve at 20% and 12%. The researchers hope that studies such as these will be of help to law enforcement agencies that are attempting to understand the growth and flow of drug use in communities."
Apples and oranges. Japan doesn't have Lindsey Lohan as a citizen.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Looking at bills from 17 cities, it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive. From a global standpoint, both Canada and Brazil tested rather high (85% and 80%, respectively), But China and Japan were well behind the curve at 20% and 12%. The researchers hope that studies such as these will be of help to law enforcement agencies that are attempting to understand the growth and flow of drug use in communities.
Nope, sorry, has nothing to do with growth and flow. Merely that China and Japan are better at properly labeling and storing their valuable narcotics and opiates. Given the cost of the substance, you would think the American & Canadian coke heads would be better at keeping it separate from other things. But when you need to carry only coke and money with you ... the cost of that second briefcase probably outweighs the amount of coke you lose just shoving money and coke into one briefcase. Being able to do it in a frenzied haphazard manner isn't just how it's done in Martin Scorsese films, it's a necessary skill of coke users and traffickers. I wonder what "essence of G-string" levels respective countries have on their smallest denominational bills?
My work here is dung.
Don't get caught with US dollars on you in Dubai.
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This has to be why people love the smell of their money. Just hold it up to your nose and sniff... and you get a minor contact high from the drugs.
... to money
when Bush recommended an 'economic stimulus'.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
... be using where's george to plan their next drug busts?
I roll up 100 dollar bills to snort up other 100 dollar bills. Its a vicious circle.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Please, could it not simply be that when the money is bundled together it is cross-contaminated?
I don't know about you, but the cocaine isn't the thing that worries me - I'm more worried about the fact that 90% of the bills I use have been up someone's nose!
I see Plan Columbia has been a smashing success, just like all the other attempts at Prohibition 2.0: This Time Without Constitutional Justification.
These types of studies come out pretty often, usually with the same hysterical tone. When you start talking about stuff in such tiny amounts then just about any substance can be found. There's cocaine in the air in many places if you go as low as parts per billion. There's uranium in the water. There's the ash of dead people in your air. There's fly eggs in your soup. There's pesticides in your baby's bottle.
If anything, this is more interesting in our ability to detect small amounts of things than a social statement.
From a global standpoint, both Canada and Brazil tested rather high...
Hah!
I am curious what the break down is on the types of bills being used. Is there a preference for $20 or $100 bills? I always preferred the $100, partly for show, but also because they tended to be crisper..
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Bill's can get cocaine on them without ever having been directly in contact with cocaine. The most common way this occurs is if a bill has cocaine on it and then it goes in or out of some sort of feeder machine (such as that on an ATM), it can leave small amounts of coke residue that then rub off on other bills. Given that, part of the disparity may be due to different types of ATMs and similar technology. Similarly, it isn't implausible that the increase in the percentage of bills with cocaine on them (as reported in TFA) might be due to some set of subtle technological changes that make it easier for cocaine to spread from bill to bill.
Come on - we want 100% from you.
Scientists have found that up to 90% of US paper money has some cocaine contamination, up from the 67% mark measured two years ago.
The contamination "spreading" is solely due to clean bills getting in contact with contaminated bills. 90% of the US dollars have not been used to sniff cocaine. If 67% were contaminated two years ago it is only logical that in time the rest would be bound to become contaminated as well, even if cocaine had seized to exist completely.
I am the lawn!
"Up to 90% of Scientists Studying Money Also Do Cocaine."
There are so many sources of cocaine and like substances in our society that it's no wonder it can be found everywhere (looking at currency is more sexy than say, doorknobs, and I'd imagine the same level of contamination), legal and otherwise. Benzocaine, for example, is a common numbing agent for oral use that is in the same chemical family. So is novacaine. They just don't have the popular cachet, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if the testing used could distinguished between them. I imagine if you tested currency for benzodiazepines (valium and the like) or SSRIs (Prozac and the like) or beta blockers or digitalis or any commonly prescribed drug, you'd find near 100% contamination as well. BFD. People use cocaine and other drugs both medically and recreationally. News at 11.
I'd be much, much more interested to know how much of the currency showed evidence of, say, uranium or plutonium. Those are supposed to be scarce, really, really scarce.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Snopes says... true. Wow, that almost never happens--I had always assumed this was a myth. The Snopes article, BTW, is much more informative and detailed than the one linked in the Slashdot post.
The extra street value of cocaine being added to the dollar should make it stronger against other currencies.
Drugs are a CASH business. It is one of the last CASH ONLY businesses out there. Most other people are taking Checks, Visa, and Debit Cards as primary sources of transactions, leaving Cash a fourth level barely used.
I would not suprise me to see this trend go upwards, and eventually some idiot politician will suggest that we get rid of cash. Which will be followed up by some Christian suggesting that is the Mark of the Beast ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive.
I always suspected the politicians were on crack, I guess now we have proof...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Dude! Dont' sniff it! Don't forget "ass pennies". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass_pennies#Ass_Pennies "I've been sticking $30 in pennies up my ass for the past 11 years! That's 3,000 pennies a day; 21,000 pennies a week; 1,092,000 pennies a year! To date that's 12,012,000 pennies, 8 times the population of Nebraska. Those pennies were in my ass! You think you're better than me? Oh, you're not better than me. You handle my ass pennies every day. You pick up my ass pennies for good luck. You throw my ass pennies in fountains and make wishes on them. You give my ass pennies to your little daughter to buy gumballs with. You handle my ass pennies every day! All of you! You all handle my ass pennies! Oh, I laugh at you before you can laugh at me. Because your pennies have been in my ass. You hear me? Your pennies have been in my ass!"
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
except your local 'law & order' politician looking to score votes in the upcoming election. And here in the States, there's always an upcoming election...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Cocaine is NOT a harmless drug, it kills people and robs them of a liveliehood at a far greater rate than almost any other drug. It is insanely addictive and knowing a couple of friends who have struggled with it I can only hope for your own sake you never try it.
Sorry, but I could say the exact same thing about liquor. Ever been to an AA meeting? Alcohol ruins more lives than any other drug in the USA. And yet it's legal.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Dude, drug prohibition is bad no matter which drug you choose. Even heroin, as bad as it is, isn't ha;f as bad as the prohibition that tries to ban it.
It all based on the idea that if you make people desperate enough, they will quit. Not entirely incorrect, some recent research shows that people quit drugs almost entirely for practical reasons.
What they ignore is the problems caused by making people desperate are worst than the original addiction. Swiss studies have shown that simply providing heroin at a price similar to what it would be on the open market decreased the amount of income that the study subjects took in through other illegal activities by 90%, in a few weeks.
Its been found they can hold down jobs (much like many alcoholics do), they can afford their habbit, afford food, etc.
Simply put, prohibition is a broken model from the very start. Cannabis is simply the largest (more cannabis smokers in the US than all other illegal drug users combined), and the one with the most ridiculous lies spread about it.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Thanks to the money of millons of addicts, LatinAmerica is a BIG WAR ZONE, where thousands of innocent people die, get wounded, forced to migrate, hunger, etc . When a addict buys their drugs are they aware of the atrocities that their money is creating in LatinAmerica?
I'd just like to say that the "War on Drugs" has been a great use of our taxpayer dollars. Very effective. Good thing we're spending so much money keeping people in prison instead of paying for medical care. Yay us.
Plus every flat surface in any bar or nightclub restroom will test positive for either Cocaine or WD40 & Vaseline :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The threshold for dogs to identify a scent can be as low as a few molecules. (I forget what it is for cocaine, but it's a very small number.) You gotta wonder how much "drug money" was just some poor slob carrying his life's savings, either through distrust of the banks (which is still common with foreigners) or being on his way to purchase something with cash.
Example: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/12/1296.asp
Given that large cash transactions are now considered "probable cause", add in the positive from the drug-sniffing dog, and it may not matter how innocent you are.
Related thought: people who handle money all day long, like cashiers, may be exposed to enough cocaine that they could conceiveably test positive, or at least dog-sniff positive.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And any handler can claim his dog "hit" on something as well, and use that as probable cause to confiscate the loot. And if someone was to loudly protest the confiscation of their money at some "random courtesy checkpoint", the cops can just shoot you and claim you made a "threatening furtive gesture" or were "interfering" or "resisting some lawful order" or anything else in cop CYA speak they dream up.
The point being made was, in some areas the cops use this "dog drug hit" BS as an excuse to outright rob people and get away with it or for intimidation to get people to confess to something else or whatever. They even go so far as to terrorize school kids with these dogs inside the schools. It's a con more than anything else. And it can be even worse than that for some people with phony dog-police type work
For legitimate rescue, I think dogs are great, useful, for most anything else as it intersects police work...starts to get wonky quickly.
Of course I am also in favor of ending the retarded prohibition laws, because they just cause more harm than good. If a 200 dollar day coke or smack or whatever habit was legal, it might cost all of two bucks, and I don't think there'd be much in the way of crime associated with it like it is today. It would still be technically "bad" IMO, the habit and what it does to people, but we as a society would get rid of a lot of the vast collateral damage associated with it being illegal.
I wonder what "essence of G-string" levels respective countries have on their smallest denominational bills?
Thanks, now I will be wondering what "Essence of stripper schlong" my 1's have...shudder
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Man i wanna be a ATM maintenance guy! you get free cocaine as a bonus while working!
In order to achieve this level on contamination, one needs to look to the source. Clearly this explains where all the bank bailout money went.... coke parties for all the bankers.
By prosecutors in cocaine cases, until the first case in which a defense lawyer requested and got, with the judge's permission, the cash out of the prosecutor's wallet, sent it off for testing for cocaine, and came back with a 100% positive test for cocaine traces on every bill. How many people were wrongly convicted with the help of the prosecutor's trick of pointing out "traces of cocaine" on the money in evidence, was exposed?
Haven't we already known this for decades now? Is it a slow news Monday or something?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If anyone is wondering about the WD40 & Vaseline, it's cause some nightclubs will put a thin layer on the toilet tank to discourage cocaine use. (It's hard to tell it's there at a glance and if you're gonna do coke, you've probably been drinking too.) If you try to scrape out lines on a coat of Vaseline, you'll end up with a greasy paste.
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