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Roadside Drug Test Sends Innocent People to Jail

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Drug TestWith cannabis legalization sweeping the country, police are more and more inclined to pull people over for minor driving infractions and look for any excuse to search the car. Even more frightening, the kit they are using to test any substances found costs $2 and is unreliable, resulting in innocent people being sent to jail.

According to the New York Times, police arrest over 1.2 million people a year on charges of illegal drug possession. However, the kit they are using to test drugs is cheap and disposable, and the technology behind it hasn’t advanced much since 1973.

The Times article follows the story of a woman and her boyfriend who were arrested for having what was perceived to be a gram of crack cocaine on the floor of their car, and a bag with powder residue in it. The couple was arrested and charged based on the “evidence,” which was tested in a roadside drug kit, and then sent to a lab for further review. After the two served about a month in jail and had their lives greatly disrupted, the substances were finally tested and found to be completely benign. The crumb was from food or detergent, and the residue in the bag was from over-the-counter pain medication.

Apparently, the tests are meant to turn blue if they come up with an illegal substance, but other chemical compounds, such as certain cleaning products, can also cause the tests to turn up a positive. Additionally, distracting conditions such as flashing police lights at night can cause the tests to appear as if they are showing a positive when they are really not.

Clearly, something needs to be done to prevent these kind of false arrests from occurring. For cases where an illegal substance needs to be tested on the fly, a more scientifically accurate kit is needed.

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