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Chances are pretty good that there are traces of cocaine in your wallet right now. And that's bad news for drug prosecutors.

The problem is that cocaine sticks to cash whenever money is handled by drug dealers and users. And studies show that cocaine is in such wide use nationally that a sizable percentage of paper money bears traces of it -- a finding that courts are starting to cite in ruling against prosecutors.

Within the past 18 months, two federal appeal courts have strongly questioned the government's reliance on cocaine-tainted cash. And in a ruling in April, a federal trial judge said the mere presence of such cocaine traces doesn't give officials the necessary "probable cause" to launch an extensive search to confiscate the cash.

Nancy Hollander, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said, "We're going to see more and more lawyers using these rulings in arguments to suppress evidence by challenging the validity of dog sniffs [detecting cocaine] and confiscation of cash."

The court decisions cite the findings of scientific and informal tests conducted in the late 1980s. Some of the tests showed that more than 95% of the cash in circulation may be cocaine-contaminated because residue from the drug remains long after the initial exposure.

One of the studies that has proved most damaging to prosecutors was done by Sanford A. Angelos, a forensic chemist with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's North Central Laboratory in Chicago. The study concluded that a third of the samples taken from several Chicago banks and from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago had traces of cocaine. The test results were reported in an undated internal DEA memo and first surfaced publicly in a trial in Los Angeles three years ago.

More important, Mr. Angelos said in the memo, the belts of the bill sorter at the reserve bank continued to spread the contamination to more and more cash. Mr. Angelos recommended, among other things, that "trace analysis or seizure be stopped."
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The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati also raised questions about the use of cocaine-tainted cash as evidence in a decision in January involving the seizure of $53,082. The court cited, among other studies, a test conducted four years ago by Lee Hearn, chief toxicologist for the Dade County medical examiner's office in Miami. In a study of currency from banks in cities around the country, Mr. Hearn concluded that 97% of the bills tested positive for cocaine.
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