“It was once estimated that 90 percent of US currency had traces of cocaine on it.”

First in 1998 and still held true in 2009 (and likely now).

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/14/cocaine.traces.money/

August 17, 2009.

In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue.

Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.

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Cocaine binds to the green dye in money, he said.

In 1998, Negrusz published similar findings after comparing freshly printed dollar bills that were not released to the public and money collected from a suburb near Chicago, Illinois. In the study, 92.8 percent of the bills from the public had traces of cocaine, but the uncirculated bills tested negative.

Although the contaminated bills do not affect health, Negrusz said, they could cause in a false positive drug test if a person, such as a law enforcement officer or banker, handles contaminated currency repeatedly.

"Imagine a bank teller who's working with cash-counting machine in the basement of the bank," Negrusz said. "Many of those bills, over 90 percent, are contaminated with cocaine. There is cocaine dust around the machines. These bank tellers breathe in cocaine. Cocaine gets into system, and you can test positive for cocaine. ... That's what's behind this whole thing that triggered testing money for drugs."

Edit: Wow, just realised the date on that article is exactly 10 years ago today (well Australian time as I posted this it is Aug 17th at 1:50pm anyway).

I wonder what percentage of bills have skin cells from exotic dancers.

That explains the term crack whore. I believe it means a stripper that snorts when you shove a 10 dollar bill on her stocking.

When Holmes was written cocaine was legal.

If you have modern versions of the story with Holmes using coke, it's supporting sociopathic and criminal behavior, which Holmes would not engage in.

Also, Holmes wasn't addicted to cocaine. He was addicted to solving crimes.

When he didn't have crimes to solve he got depressed. So, he would use a "7% solution" of cocaine to get artificially excited.

Also, cocaine was a much different product when Doyle was writing than it is today.