Do you wash your hands ? Cocaine on your U.S Dollar Bills - let us shed some light on this

by : Stig Kristoffersen

We all know that paper money is a source of bacteria and are considered not clean. You can ask yourself whether you wash your hands after handling money.

If you do not wash your hands after handling money – then look into what they found out in 2008 and 2009.
In 2008 it was found that the highest Traces of Cocaine was found on U.S. Bills and in 2009 they found that the highest amount of Cocaine was found on U.S. Bills from Washington D.D in the U.S.

So what did they find out in 2008?
Paper money contains high traces of cocaine, regardless of whether or not the paper money came into direct contact with the drug. And U.S. bills take the top spot, covered in the greatest amount of the illegal powder, while Spanish notes are the most highly contaminated in Europe, a new study finds.
The findings, detailed in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Analytical Chemistry, reflect the popularity of the illicit drug, the researchers say.

"These findings should not be surprising, because cocaine and other drugs are traded using cash, which is handled by the same fingers that directly touch the drugs or wrappings," chemists Sergio Armenta and Miguel de la Guardia from the University of Valencia in Spain write. "Moreover, many cocaine users use a wrapped banknote to sniff this drug, so inducing direct cocaine contamination of the banknotes."
Armenta and de la Guardia analyzed Spanish notes for cocaine traces, finding they contained an average of 155 micrograms of cocaine. (A gram of cocaine would fill about half a tea bag. A microgram is one-millionth of that amount.)

They also reviewed previous research focusing on cocaine concentrations found in different currencies around the world.
German Euros contained levels of cocaine that were five times lower than the Spanish ones.
For Irish bank notes, one statistic suggested that of 48 notes studied the highest concentration found was 0.5 micrograms.
The chemists found U.S. bills contained an average of between 2.9 and 28.8 micrograms of cocaine depending on the year and city, with a maximum of more than 1,300 micrograms found on some 1996 bills.
One study based on 356 notes showed just 6 percent of Swiss francs were contaminated with cocaine at levels above one nanogram per note, where a nanogram is one-thousandth of a microgram. Some data suggest, the researchers found, that between 40 percent and about 50 percent of British pounds were contaminated with cocaine at levels of about 0.0011 micrograms per note.
It turns out, money really is dirty, and not just with drug traces. One past study revealed 94 percent of $1 bills collected from a community in western Ohio contained disease-causing or potentially disease-causing bacteria. The study, published in 2002 in the Southern Medical Journal, was led by Peter Ender, chief of infectious diseases at Wright-Patterson Medical Center in Ohio.

That's not too surprising, as $1 bills stay in circulation for an average of 21 months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, during which time they get handled by plenty of people. For larger bills, the life span is even longer, with $20 bills lasting about 24 months and $50 bills staying in circulation for 55 months.
When you handle coins, stuff also gets transferred to your hands, though it's mainly iron atoms (iron is one of the metals in change). Another research study revealed iron atoms from coins cause oils on your skin to break down, producing a "metallic" odor.

And what did they find out in 2009?
Drug was found on 90% of U.S. Bills. This fact is astonishing and makes the term dirty money really a fact. If you live in the United States or Canada, chances are you have cocaine in your wallet.
Nearly nine out of ten bills circulating in the U.S. and its northern neighbor are tainted with cocaine, according to what's being called the most definitive research to date on the subject.
What's more, researchers were surprised to find hints that more Americans are using the illegal drug, said study leader Yuegang Zuo of the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.
In a similar study by the same team in 2007, 67 percent of U.S. bills were found to be tainted with cocaine. The new study puts the percentage at 85 to 95—a jump of roughly 20 percent, Zuo said.
The drug gets on paper money during drug transactions and when people roll bills to snort cocaine powder, Zuo said.

Stress spurred by the worldwide financial crisis may be driving people to abuse cocaine, one of the most common illegal drugs in the world, Zuo said in a phone interview.
The new findings could "help raise public awareness about cocaine use and lead to greater emphasis on curbing its abuse," Zuo said in a follow-up email.
Part of the reason the new study is so complete, Zuo said, is because the team used new equipment, a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, which doesn't ruin the money—allowing the scientists to test more bills without breaking the bank.

The team collected banknotes from the Brazil, Canada, the U.S., China, and Japan.
With 5.8 million people having used the drug at least once in 2007, the U.S. is the world's biggest cocaine market, according to the 2009 UN World Drug Report.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the U.S.—along with Canada—had the highest percentage of cocaine-permeated bills in the study.

Of the 234 U.S. bills collected in 17 large and small cities, nearly 90 percent had traces of cocaine, especially in larger cities such as Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit. Ninety-five percent of the dollars found in Washington, D.C., had cocaine embedded in their fibers—among the highest in the study.
In keeping with their reputations for having relatively low rates of cocaine use, China and Japan yielded bills with relatively low levels of cocaine contamination.
Asian drug-taking practices could conceivably be partly responsible for the lower percentages of cocaine-tainted bills. Zuo doesn't know, for example, whether Asian cocaine users inhale through rolled bills as many Western users do.

"It is for sure that drug abuse in different countries and regions has different use patterns which may affect cocaine contamination on money," he said via email.
Regardless of where you live, though, there's little chance of getting buzzed off your bills, Zuo said. Even in the U.S. and Canada, the concentrations are simply too small.


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About the Author
He has a background as civil engineer and geoscientist. He has worked mainly within the oil and gas industry from the mid 1980s. He has written a few fictional novels as well as being the author of some professional litterature within oil and gas sector, he is now an editor of some web sites.