Dirty money

My wife in reply to this news said ‘No wonder we get high.’ Speak for herself…..

In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue.

Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.

“When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Mom is always right.”

She is but I don’t think most mothers had narcotic contaminated money in mind when they said that.

Scientists say the amount of cocaine found on bills is not enough to cause health risks.

Has anyone studied it? Studies on marijuana for medical purposes are very difficult to conduct and I would be surprised if the rules aren’t stricter when it comes to cocaine.

Money can be contaminated with cocaine during drug deals or if a user snorts with a bill. But not all bills are involved in drug use; they can get contaminated inside currency-counting machines at the bank.

“When the machine gets contaminated, it transfers the cocaine to the other bank notes,” Zuo said. These bills have fewer remnants of cocaine. Some of the dollars in his experiment had .006 micrograms, which is several thousands of times smaller than a single grain of sand.

That is tiny but I’ll go wash my hands in case.

Hat tip- Dr. Taylor at Poliblog