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snakeyjake01/22/20251 replyview on HN

> the cashier tested it for cocaine and it came back positive

There is no commercial product capable of testing cash for drugs. Anyone claiming to sell such a product is lying.

There is a wipe, like a baby wipe, that is sold as a "cocaine detection wipe". It is a lie.

It uses a dumbed down version of a spot test that is very good at detecting cocaine, but it also reacts with many other substances that are not cocaine.

The test was dumbed down because the substances needed to make it more accurate are much more dangerous than the cobalt thiocyanate (which is STILL not good for you) used in the "safe" tests.

There are thousands and thousands and thousands of substances that will cause a cocaine detection test to return a positive reaction. One of them is Benadryl. Benadryl causes such a strong and vibrant reaction that you would think the entire object being tested was made of pure cocaine.

If you keep a single packet containing one Benadryl pill in your bag and you use it and while taking it a handful of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) molecules get transferred from your fingers to the outside of the packet, and then you toss the packet into your bag and they get transferred from the packet to the interior of your bag, to a wallet in your bag, to the cash itself, testing the cash in that wallet with a cocaine field test will produce a stronger positive result than if you had rolled up a bill and snorted a line immediately prior to the test and there was still powdered cocaine on the bill.

This is not a joke or exaggeration. If you touch a single Benadryl pill with the tip of your index finger, then poke the tip of your finger to a sheet of paper, then you put that sheet of paper in a printer and a rubber roller in the paper-handling mechanism rolls over the spot you touched, every single sheet of paper printed by that printer for MONTHS will test positively for cocaine. (using the tests that don't require training, PPE, and expensive lab equipment).

Did your totally real and not bullshit cash have drugs on them, or Benadryl, or ANY substance with the ring of carbon atoms that the test detects?

"But this study found 80% of bills had dru..."

Buddy 100% of all bills that have been used just once have actual literal shit, feces, dookie, poop, (and staph!) on them.

There is poop in your wallet right now.


Replies

beeflet01/22/2025

They rubbed some sort of pen thing on it, and they took the bills to some machine in a back room. At the time, I figured it was because they thought the bills were fraudulent (I was paying with 100s because my card didn't work).

Maybe the pen thing was only to test if the bills were fraudulent, and then the machine in the back of the store could also do drug tests? Or maybe it was all a lie and they were just bullshitting me.

The benadryl thing was a good read