Maryland Blogger alliance
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Big Brother about to get another tool
A local company thinks it's found a way to help fight meth. [To say nothing of making a tidy profit...]CDEX Inc. has developed a device which can instantly detect trace amounts of the drug.
Right now it's being tested in Greenlee County, northeast of Tucson.
"When you pull the trigger, UV light comes out of the lamps," says Wade Poteet, the principal scientist behind the scanner.
In an instant the scanner knows if a substance is meth or not. It detects traces of the drug down to one tenth of one millionth of a gram on clothes, skin, and other surfaces.
The sheriff's department showed us how it works on real meth seized as evidence.
"Just point and shoot. Keep it simple," Sexton says.
Eventually, future models of the scanner will be able to test other drugs as well, even explosives.
"We believe there are other applications, we've only begun to scratch the surface," Poteet says.
Production on the scanners is expected to start at the end of the year. Eventually they will cost between $500 and $600 dollars.
"There are benefits all the way around: we know what we got, we know how to charge people and who to keep ahold of," Sexton says.
The next step is to convince the courts of the science behind the detection. That way the justice system will accept it like it already does with radar guns.
It's just a matter of time before we see this technology misused. Will the state be held to some burden of proof that the 1/10 microgram sample found on a person's clothing constitutes guilt? Or will an "alert" by the system be used as probable cause for a search, or for holding the individual while a warrant is obtained? Is it possible to have picked up 0.1 mcg of meth by hugging someone who has recently been around the stuff? Is airborne transmission of such a tiny amount possible? (e.g., could you pick up 0.1 mcg on your clothing while innocently walking past some meth lab?)
Finally, how long will it take before some creative person in law enforcement decides to deploy this detector to randomly search people in a crowd, the way facial-recognition technology has been used on crowds of people at sporting events?