The Lost "Drugs War"

Occasionally this blog looks at the insidious nature of the drug scourge that the Western world has created for itself. This affliction, fuelled entirely by a couple of feckless generations who use drugs to a value of $380 billion a year, primarily from the retail drug sales.

This drug using group are estimated to be around 4% of the worlds population but generate a trade that brings much sorrow and crime to the world.

The invasive nature of this drug trade was starkly illustrated when a story came out that showed that 95% of dollar bills in Washington DC, bear traces of the illegal drug cocaine. This figure for the US capital is up 20% for the last two years.

Other countries where notes were tested were Canada, Brazil, China and Japan. China had the lowest rates, with only 12% of its bills contaminated, other big US cities such as Baltimore, Boston and Detroit had the highest average cocaine levels in the US on their dollar bills. In the US the cleanest bills were collected from Salt Lake City, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormons.

Europe has not been spared these sort of results, and in fact as long ago as 2003, in Germany, nine out of 10 banknotes showed clearly measurable amounts of cocaine according to the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg. The same tests run looking for concentrations of cocaine on Spanish euro notes, found that they were almost a hundred times that of the levels recorded in Germany.

The only balance to this is that Bank notes can pick up traces of cocaine directly from users snorting it through rolled up bills, or when cash is stacked together, and its assumed that the latter is the main cause of the high levels of the drug traces.