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Remember the old days when fighting crime was about cops using their experience and training to grab up bad guys? That’s generally still how it works. The difference today is the increasing use of and reliance on machines and computers to catch criminals. Criminal databases and other innovations have proven valuable in terms of giving police a leg up, but some of the technological advances in law enforcement and other industries have a few kinks that need to be worked out.
As drug testing has become routine for certain employee groups, especially for individuals who want to become police officers or firefighters, the manufacturers of drug testing equipment are enjoying boom times. But a recent report in USA Today by Mimi Hall raises serious questions about whether or not many of these devices actually work. Last summer, Nadine Artemis and Ron Obadia made plans for a family vacation in Minnesota.
The vacation ended with the two Canadian citizens being led through Toronto’s airport in handcuffs, locked up and separated from their infant child. “We were dumbfounded,” Artemis told USA Today’s Mimi Hall. Police told the couple they could be facing years in prison for exporting narcotics, because two and a half pounds of material found in their carry-on bag tested positive for hashish. That seemed unlikely to the accused.
“All we knew was that we didn’t have drugs,” Obadia said. They were telling the truth: what the machine thought was drugs was actually a bag of chocolate. Artemis and Obadia were caught up in what civil libertarians, public defenders and some narcotics experts say is a growing problem – the use of unreliable field drug-test kits as basis for arrest on drug charges. The inexpensive test kits are used by virtually every police department in the country as well as federal agents, including ICE officers who work on the nation’s borders.
The kits test suspicious materials, and a positive result generally leads to an arrest and court date. At that point, more sophisticated tests are done on the sample at a approved laboratory. The kits use acids that react with the substance in a plastic pouch. If the liquid turns a certain color, it is a considered a positive result. But a number of legal products and plants test positive as if they were narcotics: chocolate often shows up as hashish, and rosemary, a cooking spice, is mistaken by the field-tests for marijuana.
Even natural soaps can show up as the date-rape drug GHB. So should anyone be concerned about the rate of false positives? At least some current and former lawmen say yes. “The tests have no validity,” former FBI narcotics investigator Frederick Whitehurst told USA Today in an interview. “As more organic products come on the market, the potential for civil rights violations when these presumptive tests are out there is phenomenal.” Here are some of the lowlights from the USA Today investigation:
• Cornelius Salonis of Shakopee, Minn., who spent two months in jail after police stopped him in August for driving drunk and tested deodorant in his car that registered positive for cocaine. Mankato, Minn., public defender Richard Hillesheim says Salonis admitted to the drunken-driving charge “but he was scared witless about this drug charge that came out of left field.” Lab tests ultimately showed there was no cocaine.
• Punk rocker Don Bolles, who spent three days in jail in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2007 after his Dr. Bronner’s soap tested positive for GHB. The charges were dropped when lab tests found no drugs.
Government officials say there are no records on the number of people who have been wrongly arrested because of the tests. Garrison Courtney of the Drug Enforcement Agency says the test kits are “not perfect but they give you a pretty good idea” whether a suspicious substance is an illegal drug. Some say that’s not nearly a high enough standard to keep wrongly accused citizens out of the system. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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