Thousands every year are arrested based on a faulty drug test that police refuse to stop using

[davidn3600]

Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?

Amy Albritton can’t remember if her boyfriend signaled when he changed lanes late that August afternoon in 2010. But suddenly the lights on the Houston Police patrol car were flashing behind them, and Anthony Wilson was navigating Albritton’s white Chrysler Concorde to a stop in a strip-mall parking lot. It was an especially unwelcome hassle. Wilson was in Houston to see about an oil-rig job; Albritton, volunteering her car, had come along for what she imagined would be a vacation of sorts. She managed an apartment complex back in Monroe, La., and the younger of her two sons — Landon, 16, who had been disabled from birth by cerebral palsy — was with his father for the week. After five hours of driving through the monotony of flat woodland, the couple had checked into a motel, carted their luggage to the room and returned to the car, too hungry to rest but too drained to seek out anything more than fast food. Now two officers stepped out of their patrol car and approached.

Albritton, 43, had dressed up for the trip — black blouse, turquoise necklace, small silver hoop earrings glinting through her shoulder-length blond hair. Wilson, 28, was more casually dressed, in a white T-shirt and jeans, and wore a strained expression that worried Albritton. One officer asked him for his license and registration. Wilson said he didn’t have a license. The car’s registration showed that it belonged to Albritton.

The officer asked Wilson to step out of the car. Wilson complied. The officer leaned in over the driver’s seat, looked around, then called to his partner; in the report Officer Duc Nguyen later filed, he wrote that he saw a needle in the car’s ceiling lining. Albritton didn’t know what he was talking about. Before she could protest, Officer David Helms had come around to her window and was asking for consent to search the car. If Albritton refused, Helms said, he would call for a drug-sniffing dog. Albritton agreed to the full search and waited nervously outside the car.

Helms spotted a white crumb on the floor. In the report, Nguyen wrote that the officers believed the crumb was crack cocaine. They handcuffed Wilson and Albritton and stood them in front of the patrol car, its lights still flashing. They were on display for rush-hour traffic, criminal suspects sweating through their clothes in the 93-degree heat.

As Nguyen and Helms continued the search, tensions grew. Albritton, shouting over the sound of traffic, tried to explain that they had the wrong idea — at least about her. She had been dating Wilson for only a month; she implored him to admit that if there were drugs, they were his alone. Wilson just shook his head, Albritton now recalls. Fear surging, she shouted that there weren’t any drugs in her car even as she insisted that she didn’t know that Wilson had brought drugs. The search turned up only one other item of interest — a box of BC Powder, an over-the-counter pain reliever. Albritton never saw the needle. The crumb from the floor was all that mattered now.

At the police academy four years earlier, Helms was taught that to make a drug arrest on the street, an officer needed to conduct an elementary chemical test, right then and there. It’s what cops routinely do across the country every day while making thousands upon thousands of drug arrests. Helms popped the trunk of his patrol car, pulled out a small plastic pouch that contained a vial of pink liquid and returned to Albritton. He opened the lid on the vial and dropped a tiny piece of the crumb into the liquid. If the liquid remained pink, that would rule out the presence of cocaine. If it turned blue, then Albritton, as the owner of the car, could become a felony defendant.

Helms waved the vial in front of her face and said, “You’re busted.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/thousands-sent-to-jail-because-of-faulty-2-drug-test-but-police-wont-stop-using-it/

This is a very lengthy article with a lot of information. If you want the spoiler to the story...Albritton took a plea deal and went to jail. She lost her good job and had trouble getting any other employment. However, years later they finally got around to testing the crumb found in the car. It turned out the field test was a false-positive.

The field test is based on a chemical called cobalt thiocyanate. This is pink chemical that turns blue in the presence of cocaine. This test VERY popular and used all over the world in drug trafficking investigations. You have likely seen this test on shows like COPS or other documentaries. The problem is that studies show that it turns blue with at least 80 other substances, many of which are not illegal. And the vast majority of cases are never confirmed through laboratory results even though the manufacturer clearly states that all results must be confirmed in an approved lab.

The fact of the matter is that police officers are not chemists. No central agency regulates the manufacture or sale of these tests nor the training required to conduct them. Police like using them because it helps speed up their investigation and makes it easier to make arrest decisions and get confessions.

So why do these lead to convictions? A good defense attorney you would think could get this thrown out. Well, they usually don't lead to convictions at trial. Prosecutors understand the trouble with these tests, but defendants don't. The vast majority of drug cases are plea dealed before a case ever gets close to trial. Many times prosecutors will offer light sentences if an accused pleads guilty but says they will recommend a long jail sentence if it goes to trial. According to a study by the University of Michigan, 90% of drug cases are ultimately decided by plea deal.

This is an example of why it is critical to understand your rights and how the system works. Police are in the business of getting you to screw up or give a confession BEFORE you get a lawyer. Understand that the police have no obligation to tell you the truth. They WILL lie to you. However, the moment you say a lie, your credibility is toast. Do not rip up your 5th amendment rights. The ACLU has a website that tells you what to do in these type of situations. Obviously if you do have drugs in the car...then that's your fault and you'll have to deal with that. But, even then you need to know your rights to prevent getting into more trouble. Remember, it's not your job to make the cop's job easy.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-youre-stopped-police-immigration-agents-or-fbi

Just another reality in America's War on Drugs and a Prison Industrial Complex.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. At least one "test" for cocaine actually gives a positive result for the ether used in processing ..

... not the cocaine itself. This test is extremely prone to error, as the test is not at all specific for diethyl ether, and many substances found in cosmetics and toiletries give false positives. In one infamous case, the contents of a sealed moist towelette package gave a positive test for cocaine -- no matter how unrealistic it is to think that someone was trying to conceal cocaine this way.

The Scott test (cobalt thiocyanate test) and most other drug tests are examples of presumptive tests:

In medical and forensic science, a presumptive test is an analysis of a sample which establishes either:

The sample is definitely not a certain substance
The sample probably is the substance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumptive_and_confirmatory_tests

A presumptive test does not prove the test substance is present, it can only justify presuming the probability it is present is greater than if no test had been performed (hence the name). Note that the correct forensic interpretation is that a negative test clears the suspect, a positive test makes them a possible criminal, but not a proven one. If you took Organic Chemistry Lab in college, you probably remember something called Qualitative Analysis, in which a series of tests, combined with deductive logic, allows you to decide which unknown compound you have. A battery of tests is necessary, since no test is absolutely specific for any particular compound, but simply characteristic of a certain class of compounds. It would be remarkable indeed if there were a test specific just for cocaine, and even more remarkable if it were a very simple test to perform, especially in the field. In fact, the test gives positive results for cocaine and a number of other species carrying similar functional groups.

Diphenhydramine (aka Benadryl, an OTC antihistamine) and lidocaine ( a common local anesthetic) also give blue organic layers. These compounds are known false positives for cocaine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt(II)_thiocyanate

Apparently, it is not even certain how the Scott test works(!) but anyone with an elementary knowledge of chemistry can guess that the color of the cobalt species in solution changes when a ligand of the appropriate type complexes with the Co(II) ion. In the case of cocaine, there is apparently one tertiary amino group and one ester group in the active ligand; any other ligand with an amine and ester in close proximity might give the same color, and other ligands might give very similar colors -- in fact, neither diphenhydramine nor lidocaine possesses an ester group, but instead, some other weakly complexing group in addition to the tertiary amine, demonstrating how nonspecific the test is. Strangely, it is claimed that crack (i.e. free base) cocaine give a weaker color than cocaine hydrochloride, which is pretty much the opposite of what you would expect, and emphasizes how poorly the mechanism of the test is understood.

Given the well-established unreliability of such one-step tests, and the flawed logic behind them, it is surprising that arguing against their admission as evidence is not a first-year exercise in law school which any competent lawyer would be expected to ace.

[pansypoo53219]

2. how else do they get funded? this is a HIDDEN TAX. welcome to the shit bucket reagan created.

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Yay Drug War!