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.