Chances are you are carrying cocaine around in your pocket. I’m not talking about a few of you. Look at the person next to you on the Metro, your wife, your kid, your co-worker. Nearly everyone in the nation’s capital is carrying cocaine.
Scientists have examined cash in Washington, D.C., and found that 95 percent of the bills in circulation have traces of cocaine. The study was conducted by chemists with the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.
“To my surprise, we’re finding more and more cocaine in banknotes,” study leader Yuegag Zuo told scientists Monday at 238th meeting of the American Chemical Society in D.C.
Are we surprised that Washington, D.C., is the cocaine banknote capital of the world? Not really. Embarrassed, perhaps, but hardly surprised. Among the smorgasbord of illegal substances available on D.C. streets, cocaine has always been among the top choices. But cocaine use has been on the wane for many years. My sources on the D.C. narcotics squad and Drug Enforcement Administration tell me they are finding much more marijuana and the more dangerous PCP, or angel dust, on the streets.
So how is the coke getting on your dollar bills?
Dr. Zuo and the other chemists declined to hazard a guess. They only went so far as to register “alarm” that the percentage of bills dusted with coke has gone up nearly 20 percent since their last test two years ago. The scientists checked bills from 30 countries, including the United States, Canada, China and Japan. Baltimore, Boston and Detroit lined up right behind D.C. for coked-up cash. Japan and China had the cleanest bills.
The scientists did weigh in on why the percentage of cash with coke shot up. Zuo said it “could be related to the economic downturn, with stressed people turning to cocaine.”
Obviously, Dr. Zuo does not have much experience with cocaine beyond the lab. Coke is an expensive drug; when people are cash-short, they are less likely to have loose change for the white powder. Moreover, coke is not a stress reliever. If anything, it makes people jumpy and hyper.
My guess is that Zuo and his chemists ran a flawed study. First, they used small samples. They tested only 234 banknotes in the United States. Maybe they got a batch that had just been at a party in Georgetown. Second, they used a gas chromoatograph-mass spectrometer, which could detect coke in particles much smaller than a grain of sand. So the sample might have been too small and the detection too fine to make a fair assessment.
What I found alarming was the study’s abstract. It reported that 6 million Americans said they used cocaine regularly, which means they consume between 259 and 447 tons, at a cost of $35 billion to $70 billion a year. Clearly the war on cocaine has failed.
The only good news in the report is that the coke-laden cash in your pocket cannot be detected by drug-sniffing dogs. Whew.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected].
