New Technology Can Perform a Drug Test Using Fingerprints

what. a. bunch. of. haters. seriously. it’s things like this that make me hate scientists. but i suppose it’s better than a cop telling a kid that his tongue is green from smoking herb. which i have witnessed and laughed at on multiple occasions. it would be quite useful for DWI cases however, in that it would be coded to the owner through fingerprint, and he couldn’t just call up his buddies to do the breathalyzer for him. and that would be pretty cool not having drunk drivers out and about. also, this should be categorized under PSA and not regular articles, for this is a great service you have provided by warning us of those people’s (the police) technological advancements.

Great… Hooray for technology  Let’s not find a cure for cancer or anything like that. Let’s develop 2343,56767,654 ways to test people for drugs

Yeah.  We have a great test for drugs, incompetently applied and incorrectly read.  The drugs don’t even affect our ability to do our job and, in fact, may even be prescribed by a physician.  Doesn’t matter, you failed a drug test.

With regard to current drug tests:

“The majority of labs don’t follow any
guidelines Their accuracy rate is about 82%.

The bulk of errors could be attributed to
inadequate personnel, poor management, broken chain of custody,
faulty maintenance, and faulty transmissions of reports and records,
rather than the tests themselves. No government or industry agency is
responsible for monitoring the quality of work done at these
labs.”

But it’s in your permanent file.  You failed a drug test.

In another place, the rate of false positives varies widely, from about .8% to over 60%.  In some labs, there’s a base rate of false positives of 3-5% from dirty glassware.

If the lab techs are incompetent, what does the “bells and whistles” on the test matter?  

I have not verified any of these numbers.  Somebody came up with them, somehow, as near as I can tell, _not_ in any peer reviewed journal (which just would mean that someone checked everything to make sure it was either “the usual way we do things” or “a good way to do things”, and not that it was necessarily correct).  However, the suspicion that “something is rotten in the state of Drug Testing” is not harmed by the lack of hard numbers.

After all, we know that you’re all drug dealers because of the cocaine on your money.  We can measure it in our lab.

Speaking of drug test errors:

IU hired Colorado-based auditor Forensic Consultants Inc. to examine
the paper records for every positive test result from 2007 to 2009.
Auditors found errors in 10 percent of marijuana cases and 32 percent of
cocaine cases. They were working on the substance involved in the most
cases — alcohol — when informed by email to “place a hold” on the audit.

“What they have done,” said prominent Indianapolis defense attorney
J.J. Paul, “is open Pandora’s box, and now they want to close it just as
they get to the greatest number of cases that affect the greatest
number of people.”

…
 
http://www.theagitator.com/2011/07/20/indiana-may-halt-crime-lab-investigation/

Even when a drug testing *lab* is found to have an absurd error rate, it’s allowed to stand. We’ll see if this field test stands up to independent review, but even then, it probably won’t matter. It hasn’t stopped law enforcement agencies from using any other field tests that regularly give false positives.

Geekosystems sure seems excited about the new ability to monitor how I choose to live my personal life.

 Handshake causes false positive.

john frum has it right. If someone’s fingertips are leaving residue everywhere, what’s to say it isn’t transferred? And like michaelk42 said, it won’t stop law enforcement using tests that have been proven to be wrong or indeterminate. Look at how many agencies and companies – and now even lovers! – are demanding polygraph test when it is INCREDIBLY easy to get false positivies AND negatives.Speaking of cocaine residue: I was once fined about $800 in 2006, forced to turn around back into New York from Montreal because they allegedly found cocaine residue on my driver’s license. How many bartops, bartenders & bouncers have held my license in the years I’ve had it? They told me to just pay the fine and “don’t even try coming back for a few years.”This new drug test claims to give immediate results for cannabis intoxication. Cannabis stays in the body sometimes more than a month, your body is continually metabolizing it, even though the high doesn’t last longer than several hours. How is sweating out the metabolites through your fingertips days later any different from pissing them out days later?Considering all of the misery in the world, this hysteria in seeking out what people do in their own time to their own bodies reeks of totalitarianism, and is especially hypocritical considering the dangers of the legal drugs alcohol & tobacco, and the massive profits those companies rake in.I can understand doing tests on someone driving dangerously or who has caused an accident on the road or at work, but this rampant testing of everybody all the time is a HUGE invasion of privacy – even if my fingerprints are declared public.

I’m sorry, but gold-labeled antibody technology is not ‘new’ by any means.  There’s already an instant, on-site test called DrugWipe, which can be used to test surfaces, sweat or saliva and has been in use for more than 15 years all over the world.  So, how is this going to ‘revolutionize’ drug testing?