MOST CASH BEARS TRACES OF COCAINE, FBI EXPERT SAYS

Effect On Drug Dogs Widely Debated

A top scientist for the FBI says the money you're carrying in your
wallet is probably contaminated by cocaine.

Thomas Jourdan, chief of materials and devices at the FBI laboratory
in Washington, D.C., says 85 percent to 90 percent of the currency in
the United States has measurable amounts of cocaine. "A new bill is
kind of a wall-to-wall sticky surface in a microscopic sense," Jourdan
said. "And over the course of that bill's life, it gets things to
adhere to it as well as drugs of abuse."

Everyone's money is likely tainted -- even those who've never seen
crack or powder cocaine in their lives, Jourdan says. That means
there's plenty of debate over whether dogs trained to smell drugs
might alert officers to the cash of the innocent as well as the guilty.

Despite such findings, which have been cited in court rulings against
prosecutors, police in Crittenden County as well as Little Rock and
other areas of the state use drug dog alerts to determine if they
should seize cash.

Mickey Thornton, head of the Crittenden County Narcotics Unit, says
Jourdan's findings don't affect the reliability of the drug dogs his
team uses. The dogs, he said, are discriminating and only hit on cash
heavily dusted with drugs. He adds that officers also do shake tests
on the money and collect the residue for future crime lab testing.

"If I take a $20 bill out of my pocket, will a dog hit on it? Probably
not,'' Thornton says. "It's got to be a good amount for the dog to hit
on it.''

Stefan Rose, a forensic toxicologist at Florida International
University in Miami who testifies for prosecutors in drug cases, agrees.

He says his tests show that the amounts of cocaine on bills in general
circulation aren't enough to trigger alerts from a properly trained
drug dog.

Rose says the element in cocaine that drug dogs react to is methyl
benzoate, which evaporates quickly. Only cash that has been kept in
proximity to large amounts of cocaine and then bundled will retain
that element for any significant length of time, Rose says.

But seizures based only on drug dog alerts shouldn't occur, given the
research on levels of drugs adhering to the general monetary supply,
says Terry Hall, who has testified, primarily on behalf of the
prosecution, in more than 500 drug cases and is laboratory director
for Toxicology Testing Service Inc. in Miami.

"Anytime you take a bunch of money and let a dog sniff it, he will
find cocaine on it,'' Hall says. "It doesn't mean you're a drug
smuggler. It just means you had a lot of money in one place.''

He says he testified in one recent case where a drug dog hit on stacks
of cash stored at a bank.

Hall has tested bills taken from cities throughout the nation. He's
looked at money from Miami, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Fort Worth,
Seattle and Los Angeles, among other places.

"Every place where we tested 10 bills, at least nine had some cocaine
on them," Hall says.

He conducted a test for a Florida newspaper in the 1980s that
retrieved bills from 10 prominent citizens. Nine of the bills had
cocaine on them, he says. Among those who gave money that tested
positive for cocaine were Jeb Bush, who went on to become Florida's
governor, and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, at the time the chief
prosecutor for Dade County.

Hall says the amount of contamination varied widely, further
establishing the difficulty in judging who is or isn't a drug
trafficker by the level of cocaine on cash.

Cash seized from drug dealers isn't destroyed but goes back into
circulation. The cocaine from those bills falls into the mechanical
currency counters banks use, Jourdan said, and those counters then
spread the cocaine to the other bills they sort, essentially
"homogenizing'' the monetary supply.

Studies like those conducted by Jourdan and Hall are finding their way
into court rulings against prosecutors.

In 1994, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled
that a drug dog's hit on $30,060 did not justify seizure of the money
even though the owner gave a false account of the money's source.

"We have previously found such an alert to be 'strong evidence' when
making a probable cause determination,'' the panel said in the ruling.
"In recent years, however, subsequent courts, including our own, have
questioned the probative value of positive dog alerts due to the
contamination of America's paper money supply with narcotics residue."

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati also raised
questions about the use of cocaine-tainted cash as evidence in a 1993
decision involving the seizure of $53,082.

In that case, the panel of judges concluded, "a court should seriously
question the value of a dog's alert [indicating cocaine] without other
persuasive evidence." The appeals court panel threw out the seizure as
unconstitutional on other grounds.

In 1997, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ordered the
return of about $500,000 police confiscated from a pizzeria. In that
ruling, the judicial panel stated, "recent cases have verified our
belief that the probative value of dog sniffs is, at most, minimal."

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles Arkansas cases,
returned $77,000 seized from a man at the St. Louis Airport in a 1996
decision. Judge C. Arlen Beam wrote in that decision that "an
extremely high percentage of all cash in circulation today is
contaminated with drug residue. The fact of contamination alone is
virtually meaningless and gives no hint of when or how the cash became
so contaminated.''

Beam, a judge from Nebraska appointed in 1987 by President Ronald
Reagan, wrote: "This is a cautionary tale, illustrating the mischief
to which our eagerness to employ forfeitures as a weapon in the war on
drugs can lead." Judge James B. Loken, a 1990 George Bush appointee,
agreed; Judge Morris S. Arnold of Little Rock, a 1992 Bush appointee,
dissented.

Jourdan got interested in studying the subject to try to find if there
was a way to compare drug dealers' money to that of law-abiding citizens.

He found that the background level of cocaine on bills in general
circulation ranges from about 3 to 12 nanograms per bill, depending on
the area of the country. The nanogram level is one billionth of a
gram, far smaller than a pinpoint.

"It's not so much interesting finding cocaine on money with a
seizure," he says. "It's the level of cocaine that's seized in
comparison to cocaine on money in general circulation that is
interesting.''

Jourdan said if a lab test finds 400 nanograms of cocaine per bill in
an area where the normal background level is much lower, "then that's
interesting because that money is scientifically and statistically
different."