FaceBook friends, please ignore. This post should have gone here instead of my notes page. It's one of those days, again. As an act of contrition, I've added a picture and lightly edited the post for content, running time, and to fit your screen format.For anyone interested (and since I'm likely on a DEA watch list by now anyway) here are the stats I used for my recent CokeMoney posts:
In FY 2008, the US Bureau of Engraving & Printing delivered 7.7 billion notes (stats from the BEP Web Site). This number includes all denominations. 95% of those bills were to replace bills already in, or taken out of circulation. I confess that I slacked on the math a bit here, sorry! Please submit any complaints, comments, or corrections to our customer service website - http://www.gopoundsand.com.
Of those 7.7 billion notes approximately 80% have, by now, come in contact with powder cocaine - usually by way of an ATM or counting machine. (Stats from this Snopes.com article: http://www.snopes.com/busi
80% of 7.7 billion notes is 6.16 billion notes - still a lot of cash! (Fun facts: That's about 13 million pounds worth, or a stack of bills about 418 miles high!)
Also according to the Snopes article, the estimated average amount of cocaine per contaminated note is 16 micrograms per note. (1 microgram = 1 millionth of a gram for all you drama majors out there.)
Based on those figures, we get 98,560,000,000 micrograms total, or 98.56 kilograms of cocaine. This is the answer to William Gibson's original question, "If you soaked all the money in America in a BIG vat, then removed the money and evaporated the water, how much cocaine would you have?"
Curious, I took things a step further. The "street price" of any narcotic varies widely across the country, so I hit up a few sites (mostly law enforcement, but a few "amateur enthusiasts" as well) and compared the results. In the end, I decided to use a value of $20,000 / KG for cocaine, because it's a nice round number and it's at the lower end of the scale.
ERGO: 98.56KG of coke * $20,000.00 / KG = $1,971,200.00 worth of cocaine floating around on our dollar bills.
Q.E.D. bitches!
