7 Comments

Junk science at work. I can hear them now: “But, it turned blue!”

What I find curious here, beyond the use of an unreliable field test kit, is what exactly the basis for detention was. Let’s assume that a field test kit known to be reliable detects traces of heroin in a can of oil. So what? Nobody is going to shoot up on those traces since the amount is very small and in any case has to be extracted from the oil. Only if they had reason to believe that the oil contained significant quantities of heroin that could be extracted from it in an economical manner would there be a basis for a drug smuggling charge. Otherwise, detection of traces of heroin would only provide the basis for a more careful search of her vehicle.

Bill, you’re not thinking like a cop. Blue = Bust. It’s that simple.

Any chance of a false arrest charge sticking?

I’d guess not.

I think one of the missing things is poor training of the police officers. Any chemical field test can give false positives based on known contaminants. I would strongly suspect that petroleum or petroleum based chemicals routinely give false positives for this particular field test.

If the police are not trained to not use the test strips on chemicals known to give false positives, their training program i s deficient, and probably knowingly deficient.

Test strips make sense for a squad car patrolling a neighborhood, where the police have little formal chemical training, and not much room for analytical equipment. Test strips should be used only for a preliminary assesment.
One of my questions, given that these tests are routinely performed at border crossing stations (which don’t move around, but are situated in buildings), why not have some equipment at the border station? We already put “sniffers” for bomb material and counters for radiation at these border stations. Both the US Border Patrol and, I suspect Canada’s equivalent, have access, within their own ranks, to people with at least some chemistry training. If not, they could be recruited.
Simple, relatively, small gas chromatograph/mass spectrometers (GC-Mass Specs) have been designed and produced (including models which can fit in the trunk of a car). And I would trust the results given by a GC-Mass Spec calibrated with known samples of “controlled substance” far more than these test strips. You could have the results in minutes, slower than test strips, but not much time considering.
Why do we not do this? The only thing I can think of is that cops live to bust people, innocence be damned. It also helps to explain things like the Texas man who had his crop of hydroponic tomatos destroyed, and was briefly jailed, because the cops “thought” that they were marijuana plants. (For you botanically challenged, tomatoes and marijuana do not look at all alike.)

Ironically, another difference between tomatoes and marijuana is that consuming the leaves of tomato plants will kill you while consuming the leaves of marijuana will not.