2023-04-25 16:00:07
In 2012, a scientific study carried out by the “experts” of the technical and scientific police of Ecully (Rhône) revealed that half of the banknotes seized in France by the police contained traces of cocaine. Eleven years later, the gendarmes of the toxicology department of the judicial center of the national gendarmerie (PJGN) of Pontoise (Val-d’Oise) complete the picture: residues of narcotics are found on almost all banknotes in circulation in France.
“Statistically, there is always a trace”, says Colonel Sandrine Sabini, head of the gendarmerie’s toxicology department, who analyzes approximately 330 banknotes each year, seized in ten to fifteen court cases, and 500 banknotes “general circulation” issued by the Banque de France for comparison.
To reach these conclusions, the state-of-the-art laboratory of the PJGN uses high-tech means. Tickets are first “washed” with a solvent which, once recovered and diluted with a “deuterated standard mixture”, is injected into a chromatography apparatus coupled to a tandem mass spectrometer. The raw data is then exploited by the experts, using programmed reprocessing software to find and quantify the traces of six narcotics: cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, methamphetamines, ecstasy and THC (the active principle of cannabis). Result: statistically, more than 90% of tickets are impregnated with more or less significant traces of drugs.
Unsurprisingly, the smallest denominations, which circulate more than the large ones, are also the most affected. Cocaine, above all, is found in greater quantities than other products, not only because the product itself is extremely powdery, but because its traffic and its consumption are increasing exponentially. According to a report issued on 1is March by Gérald Darmanin, Eric Dupond-Moretti and Gabriel Attal, respectively Ministers of the Interior, Justice and Public Accounts, 27 tons were seized in 2022, i.e. 2.3 times more than the volume observed two years earlier early, already considerable despite a pandemic year marked by long periods of confinement.
Determined decision threshold
The significant means of detection implemented by the gendarmerie are not only intended to feed scholarly studies for chemists or public authorities. They also, and above all, make it possible to partly characterize the existence of drug trafficking when the searches carried out within the framework of legal proceedings do not bring to light any quantity of drugs but large quantities of cash. In this case, the higher the rate of impregnation, the higher the probability of dealing with banknotes from drug trafficking. “This allows us in particular to discriminate between tickets linked to traffic and those whose drug level is close to that observed on the cuts in general circulation”, specify again M.me Seventy.
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