(Before I jump into this week”s subject, I just want to say that it is encouraging to occasionally receive validation for something you write. Last Monday, after Saturday”s column about the possible red tape of trying to put a kids” lemonade stand in the paper, I read about a 10-year-old New York girl who was fined $50 for not having a permit to operate a lemonade stand. Fortunately, authorities were eventually pressured to drop the fine.)
As a parent, have you ever warned your children to never, ever put money in their mouth because it is, next to the toilet, the nastiest thing on the planet? If you don”t have kids, you probably remember your mom or dad telling you this when you were a child. I know I heard it from my mom and I passed it on to my kids.
Well, there is definitely some truth to the axiom. Actually, more than 100 years ago, in 1905, Dr. Thomas Darlington, who was the Health Commissioner of New York City at the time, oversaw a set of experiments to discover what could be found on bills and coins. After the tests, Dr. Darlington lobbied the House Committee on Banking and Currency and told them “It was desirable in the interest of public health that soiled bills be withdrawn from circulation as soon as practicable.”
In Japan, where “cleanliness is next to godliness” much more than it is here, moms have gotten the banking business to offer “clean ATMs.” Before the yens are ejected out of the machine, they are “pressed between rollers for one-tenth of a second at 392 degrees, enough to kill many bacteria.”
OK, I”ve established the fact that money is dirty, even money that hasn”t been raked in by the Mob in the transaction of illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution. I”m taking about real dirt. And, now, there is a new twist to the dirty money story, which is the fact that as high as 90 percent of United States paper money has cocaine residue on it.
Professor Yuegang Zuo, PhD, from the University of Massachusetts was in charge of a study of American currency this year and in 2007, to once again see what is on paper money. The cocaine finding is mind-boggling. When you realize that it is estimated that there are from two to six million cocaine users in the United States, the study illustrates the amazing journey, from person-to-person, that our money travels. Think about it. There are 307 million people in the United States. If I use the top cocaine user estimate of six million, which means two percent of the population uses cocaine, but 90 percent of the money is contaminated with cocaine. It really is a “money-go-round.”
There are a couple of interesting sidebars from Dr. Zuo”s report. One is the fact that in 2007, when he performed the same study, the percentage of U.S. bills with cocaine residue was at 67 percent. That is a huge jump in just two years. Also, worthy of note is the fact that on money from Japan and China, cocaine is only found on 12 to 20 percent of the paper bills.
So, when I put this all in perspective, I come up with the conclusion that we should probably change the story concerning the reason our kids should not put money in their mouth. Now, we don”t want them to become addicted to cocaine. But, of even greater importance is the fact that the U.S. war on drugs has failed, as a 2008 Brookings Institution report clearly indicated by stating, “The only long-run solution to the problem of illegal narcotics is to reduce the demand for drugs in the major consuming countries, including the United States.”
Gary Dickson is the Record-Bee editor and publisher. Contact him at gdickson@record-bee.
