I can get high off enough dollar bills?

This is highly suspect. I would tend to believe there was trace amounts of cocaine on their equipment which made them think it was on the bills.
eg: If I'm wearing purple sunglasses the world is 95% purple.

I am surprised that it is that low. Of course, I could care less whether or not money has drug residue or not; it is not like I am going to attempt extraction of the drug from the bills.

MrBradley: Could you? Yes, but it is extremely difficult to do. I would not attempt to hang my hat on that defense if you get caught with a straw up your nose.

To be expected I guess, since it's trace amounts it doesn't come off easily, and just gets wiped off onto more in the wallet, it's inevitable really.

Now, instead of Bush sitting there, shouldn't it be Scarface...I believe that's where the original picture came from.....

Guess that explains that nice tingly feeling you feel when you get paid...

Of course DC had the highest rate... Wherever there's wealthy white men with political power, there's coke and gay male escorts....

I guess this explains why I'm addicted to money.

Man, the some of the comments on here are f-in hilarious!! Whoever smashed George's head on Al Pacino did a good job! Man, I posted it on my facebook... awesomeness. Oh yea, about the topic? Who gives a shit.

This is news why? Who cares? Besides, why not put Obama's picture here? Unlike Bill Clinton, at least Obama admitted to inhaling a narcotic. Must be a slow news day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-d [...] 59_pf.html

Here in Canada, 87% of bills have traces of maple syrup.

wtf with the bush_cocaine picture? what does that have to do with anything?

You'd think with all the money laundering that goes on those bills would be squeaky clean.

^You would be surprised..... that's where our tax money went

If the u.s bills is the most dirtiest then the keyboard and mouse should be the second and third dirtiest right?

LMFAO @ chuckdalton!!

The Bush and Cocaine picture is just downright funny. Oh Yea homerhellboy223 - You must've not read the entire article. Here, let me quote

I usually lick every bill i have. It's a good way to build up immunities!

234 bills? with the billions in circulation, 234 bills is a good sample set- 13 bills per city? were they ones, tens, twenties, hundreds? Were all the bill collected at the same sample point, thus contacting one another and polluting the samples?

That sample size is not large enough to paint a picture for the whole country.

Thanks for pointing that out Draven35 - there is something called an unrepresentative sample - and this is a common fallacy people fall for.

For those of you who have forgotten your statistics (or who never had to take it or a rigorous research science course), we can only extrapolate about the population we sampled. When we sample only 18 US cities (in other words, excluding many other cities, smaller urban settings, and all rural settings) then saying the results apply to the entire US currency set is an overgeneralization.

Its kind of like sampling 100 campuses across the US and stating that US citizens are liberal or sampling Nigeria and then concluding 98% of the human population is black.

I fully agree with the lecturer I saw on TED that said we need to change the apex of high school mathematics from calculus to probability and statistics. (For that matter, also change the goal of English from grammar to logic and argument - spelling is important but sound and valid reasoning is critical.)

Went to the Scientific America article to find out more - $1, $5, $10, $20, and $100 bills were samples.

If we are to assume an equal number of each bill, then this gives a sample size of 2.6 bills per denomination per city. N = 2.6 is no where near the needed sample size.

Where were these samples taken? At banks, from store registers, out of volunteers' wallets? Why so few?

My favorite response from that article's comments was by ifitzme:

All it would take is one heavily contaminated bill to ruin an entire sample. Isn't it convenient how nowhere in either this writing or the one by Scientific America does it state that the samples were properly isolated prior to testing? This goes along with what frozenlead and MDillenbeck have been pointing out about the samples themselves.

This is just one more pile of garbage recycled as "scientific research."

I think statistically speaking this statistic is inacurate...

Really old news. I read this well over a year ago.

I don't see why anyone is surprised at the number. It's old news.

Pretending it's new though... Just now I opened up my wallet and found bills that have been in circulation for over a decade. The study is reporting on whether trace amounts of cocaine were present or not, regardless of how much. Given the small amounts they're looking for, a clean bill could just as easily be "cocainized" merely through contact with a contaminated bill. Or even a single dirty bill passes through a cashier station, and the cashier passes trace amounts of cocaine to other clean bills through skin contact. Over ten years, that's a lot of paper a dirty bill could contaminate.

A much more interesting study would be to find the correlation between contamination ratio and the age of the bill. Building that picture up over many years could probably tell you something interesting and useful about a substance's use.

So thats why so everyone likes money...

I think we can admit that America is addicted to something...

The Benjamins are fine

Well that does it, I'm boycotting money.

Yet ANOTHER slow news day, this has been common knowledge since before I started using Bolivian Marching Powder