The Cocaine on Your Money

I was sitting in my Bioanalytical Chemistry class today, listening to the professor talk about various different recent public concerns that involved analytical chemistry, when she brought up an interesting study. Approximately 95% of all US currency has trace amounts of cocaine on it. No, there's no chance of you getting high from snorting your $20s, but it is there. The average dollar bill has 29 micrograms of cocaine (10^6 micrograms = 1 gram) on it, with the highest amount measured being about 1mg on a single dollar bill.

That got me thinking

Beyond the idea that I got that I'm not going to share online because of the potential that it has, I started to wonder exactly how much money would it take to get 1 kilo of cocaine off of $1 bills (quick note: I am most certainly not a drug user. I was wondering about it for purely academic reasons). The math is as follows:

Variable: X = amount of $1 bills

(X)(29ug)(1Kg/10^9ug)(95%) = 1Kg

For you math-illiterate people, that's amount of $1 bills times 29 micrograms times the conversion factor for micrograms to kilograms times 95%. Do the math out and that yields approximately $36,297,641

Damn, that's a lot of money.

To give you perspective, according to this article (http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/newsreleases/articles/071221sanjuan.htm) the street value of 1 kilo of cocaine is $23,250. That means for the amount of money it takes get 1 kilo of cocaine (not including the extraction and purification processes) you can get about 1560 kilos.

The moral of the story? Don't try to use cocaine on money to get high. It's not cost effective.

Keep thinking.

The Beginning of a Stream of Thought

Well, here it is. I've been meaning to do this for quite a while, and now I've done it.

Now I bet you're all wondering "What's 'It'? And for that matter, who are you?". Well, that's a great question! First of all, I am Peter Edwards. I am an undergraduate student studying chemistry at Northeastern University, and I have a mind that can be often described as nearly hyperactive. That doesn't mean that I have attention problems, it just means that I'm constantly thinking of something. Which brings me to "It". "It" is the collection of my random thoughts. All of the philosophical questions, opinions on world events, the occasional musical outburst, and, of course, mindless chemical ideas.

This is not meant to be professional in any way, nor should you take what I say for granted. One of my core beliefs in life is that everything must be taken with at least grain of salt. If I am blogging about something that you know nothing about, then by all means do not let me be your sole source of information. While I sure hope that I know what I'm talking about, much of what I come up with that isn't an opinion or recollection is stuff that I think through by myself, and is by no means academically sound. And everything that I do that creates academically sound information and data will not be directly posted here, due to the fact that I actually plan on publishing stuff eventually. This is simply my thoughts.

With that, I hope to update at least once a week. Let's see how well that works out.

Keep thinking.