Free cocaine in Rome

June 5th, 2007

Over at the Transform blogspot, Steve R has written an account of the recent shocking revelation that a study of air quality in Rome found traceable amounts of cocaine floating around in the air. Rather than point out the benefit of free charlie, or make the sensible point that this proves having cocaine detected on your clothing shouldn’t necessarily be incriminating, Dr. Ivo Allegrini decided to indulge in a bit of fear mongering by warning of the supposed risks. Steve counters:

Assuming that one active dose of cocaine is about 100mg (consumed in one go), then at 0.1ng per cubic metre that means one dose in 10^12 cubic metres, i.e. a cube of air 10km each side. So, that’s roughly the amount of air you’d breathe in 2 billion, billion, billion, billion, billion (2×10^15) breaths*. Or, put another way, normal breathing for somewhere in the region of two hundred million years (+ or - a few million years, depending on age/body weight/lung capacity etc).

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