Claim: A large percentage of U.S. currency bears traces of
cocaine. Origins: So often those "everybody knows" facts we
naively place reliance upon turn out to be embarrassingly false.
Such is not the case here, in that there is some truth to the
"U.S. currency tainted by cocaine" claim, but the implications
of this conversation-stopping fact are far more mundane than we
might initially presume. To put it another way, it's less
shocking a fact than we first perceive it to be because the
underlying assumption — that every bill bearing traces of
cocaine got that way through having been used to inhale lines of
cocaine — is false. Contrary to our first thought upon
encountering this interesting little fact, that trace amounts of
cocaine turn up on approximately four of every five bills in
circulation doesn't mean the now-contaminated currency was at
one time used to snort coke or passed through the dope-laden
paws of seedy characters. Rather, the drug is easily conveyed
from one bill to another because cocaine in