More reliable drug test could keep innocent people out of jail
Developer touts device’s accuracy
ORLANDO, Fla. — In November, a passenger in a Florida-bound car sued Pennsylvania state police who mistook homemade soap in his trunk for cocaine.
The incident, which landed the man in jail for nearly a month, is not the first time a field drug test has identified illegal drugs that turned out to be a harmless substance.
But if a University of Central Florida doctoral student and his partners succeed, it could be one of the last.
David Nash, 28, hopes to have a portable drug-testing device ready by next year. He plans to manufacture and sell it to law enforcement agencies through IDem Systems, a company created for that purpose.
The device consists of a black plastic box a little larger and deeper than a deck of cards manufactured on a 3-D printer at UCF. It will also come with a smartphone app. The partners are trying to find a software developer to create the app and a database of drug reference standards.
It works like this: A law officer will mix a sample of a suspected drug with a drop of alcohol and place it on a chemically coated test strip. The strip will be fed into the device, called a spectrometer, which has an ultraviolet light inside. The strip will glow a different color depending on the drug.
A cellphone will be held to a window in the device, and the app will capture a picture and transmit it to the database, where a match will be made — or not.
“The idea is to get rid of the human,” said chemistry professor Richard Blair. “Color is a very subjective experience. Also, you’d be surprised at how many people can’t follow instructions.”
Nash, Blair and business consultant Terry Pierce are Idem co-founders. The collaboration was arranged through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program at UCF.
Blair got the idea for the device while working on another drug-identification project and brought Nash into the project. One goal is to help law-enforcement officers do their jobs better.
“It’s also to make sure innocent people aren’t going to jail,” Nash said.
The plan is for the device to be tested by the UCF Police Department and the Seminole and Sarasota county sheriff’s offices, which would not use it in criminal prosecutions.
In currently used field tests, officers place a sample of suspected drugs in a bag of liquid that turns a particular color depending on the substance. But some forensic scientists and others say the tests are unreliable, and they also destroy the sample.
All field tests are generally used only to establish probable cause for an arrest, but they can still result in an innocent person’s spending time in jail and money on legal fees. Only more precise tests done by a laboratory are admissible in court.
Orange-Osceola Public Defender Robert Wesley said current field testing is not done in a scientific setting. The results are open to interpretation and subject to the honesty of the officer performing them, he said
“That’s what I think makes it suspect,” Wesley said.
Other companies market alternative products designed to field-test drugs, but Nash and Blair hope theirs will be more affordable, accurate and easy to use. and also safer because it includes no dangerous chemicals.