DESIGNER DRUG TO BLAME FOR DISINTEGRATING EURO NOTES

German police have claimed that the corrosive designer drug known as
"crystal meth" was responsible for hundreds of self-destructing euro
notes which have been mysteriously disintegrating in the hands of
baffled shoppers and bank clerks since early last summer.

More than 1,700 crumbling €50 and €20 notes have surfaced in at least
17 German towns and cities since June this year, prompting fears of a
potential health risk and speculation about a possible blackmail attempt.

The crumbing note mystery, which causes large holes to appear in euro
notes as soon as they are touched, prompted a nationwide
investigation by police and the German Bundesbank, which has been
obliged to take back hundreds of damaged €50 and €20 notes. Yet
nobody blamed drug users for the problem.

Police and the German Bundesbank said they had almost certainly
solved the mystery. The answer is apparently the designer drug
crystal methamphetamine. Taken through the nose, the drug is rapidly
replacing cocaine at parties and on the German club scene. Rainer
Wenzel, a police forensic scientist who has been given the job of
solving the bank-note mystery, said yesterday that crystal meth
addicts habitually used a €50 or a €20 note to portion out and snort
the drug because the notes had the right proportions.

"When a contaminated note comes into contact with human sweat, an
aggressive acid is produced," he said. "If the note is in a wallet
with a wad of other notes, the corrosion will spread to all of them."

Police said that although crystal meth had originated in the United
States, where it has become the scourge of rural America, large
quantities of the highly addictive and destructive drug were coming
into Germany from Poland and the Balkans, where crystal
methamphetamine was being refined and mixed with corrosive sulphates
in the process.

Drug users in Europe should be wary: if the example of the US is
anything to go by, crystal meth can prove lethal to rural communities
not usually associated with chronic drug abuse.

Much more so than cocaine, crack, heroin or marijuana, small-town USA
has steadily fallen prey to crystal meth, the effects of which are
described by some as "having 10 orgasms at once".

Originally produced using over-the-counter medication containing
ephedrine bought from local chemists, use of the drug has steadily
increased over the past few years.

Although disintegrating €50 and €20 notes are a new phenomenon, the
discovery of drug traces on bank notes has become routine. Three
years ago German researchers conducted an exhaustive examination of
600 euro notes. They found that nine out of 10 banknotes carried
clearly measurable amounts of cocaine and concluded that they could
contaminate notes in bank cash-counting machines.

Professor Fritz Soergel of the Nuremberg Institute for Pharmaceutical
Research, which carried out the study, started examining euro notes
shortly after the introduction of the new currency in January 2002.
Back then, only two out of 70 notes were found to carry traces of cocaine.

He said that his findings showed there was a clear correlation
between the contaminated notes and levels of recorded cocaine use in
the 12 countries of the euro currency zone. "Much less cocaine was
found on banknotes from countries where there is less cocaine usage,
such as France, Finland and Greece," he said.

The worst offenders were the Spanish. Professor Soergel said he and
his team of researchers were "almost knocked flat" by the results of
a study conducted in Barcelona. "The concentrations of cocaine on
Spanish notes were almost a hundred times that of what we recorded in
Germany," he said.