Sometimes you read some piece of information that is so funny, you almost explode with laughter. The opening of this short article is pretty funny.
"More than three quarters of all the paper money in Los Angeles has some cocaine or other drug stuck to it." That's unbelievable. If you have four dollar bills--three out of those four will have cocaine or some other drug stuck to them. Who said this? This was said by the 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals, which relied on that fact to dismiss a case against a man suspected of drug trafficking.
The implications of this are enormous--and the 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals does not fail to point out the implications. "That means, the court said, that virtually everyone in Los Angeles is conceivably at risk of being barked at by drug-sniffing police dogs." The dogs will go barking mad. Everybody is carrying tainted money. "In powdered form, the court said, cocaine is so sticky that a bit remains when a drug dealer wraps it in a bill folded like an envelope or a user snorts it through a rolled dollar....The bottom line, said attorney Jerold Bloom, is that anyone with tainted currency can be stopped and alleged to be a drug dealer."
All this may be a surprise to us ordinary dollar bill carrying citizens, but the article I am quoting from--which appeared in The Los Angeles Times, says "The notion that most dollars are drug tainted has been well known in law enforcement and scientific circles for ten years." For ten years they've known this. They've known that the dollars we all carry have drugs stuck to 'em. Suddenly I see a druggie who is listening to me grabbing his wallet, sniffing his dollars. Right now you too can get high by sniffing the dollar bills in your wallet.
Is there a better example of how we are not winning the quote unquote, war on drugs. War on drugs? Who are we going to arrest? We are all carrying drugs. Three out of four dollars in our pockets contain traces of a drug. And once again the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was not slow to arrive at the proper conclusions. It ruled that, quote: police and prosecutors ability to rely in court on a positive alert from a drug sniffing dog will be seriously diminished."
That, folks, is putting it mildly. A barking dog means nothing, not when it comes to war on drugs. We have met the enemy and he is us; we all carry drugs. Just check your wallet.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein