They were competent the verity. They didn’t have drugs. They had chocolate.
The couple were caught up in what civil libertarians, public defenders and more narcotics experts affirmation is a growing question: the use of unreliable expanse drug-test kits as the groundwork to arrest innocent people on charges of illegal drugs.
The inexpensive test kits are used by virtually every police part in the country and through federal agents, including Customs officers at the community’session borders. The kits test suspicious materials, and a positive result generally leads to an arrest and court date, pending more sophisticated tests done later than the sample is sent to a lab.
The kits use powerful acids that react with the substance in a plastic pouch. If the liquid turns a plain color, it is a considered a positive result. But a number of legal products and plants example positive: chocolate beneficial to hashish; rosemary in mortification of marijuana; and natural soaps for the "date-rape drug" GHB.
"The tests have in no degree validity," preceding FBI narcotics conductor of researches Frederick Whitehurst says. And as greater quantity systematized products send on the market, "the potential on account of civil rights violations when these probable tests are gone out there is phenomenal."
Although police acquire been using the domain test kits for decades, "there’s no regulation, no oversight that these drug tests perform in any way," says Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps President David Bronner, whose products bring forth assayed positive for GHB.
With the growth of organic and affectionate foods and products, arrests may increase, experts say.
"We are alarmed by the growing number of people who hold been taken to penitentiary in quest of merely possessing organic products," says Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association.
On Aug. 29, Artemis and Obadia, founders of Living Libations, a company that makes radical and natural food and beautiful trait products in Haliburton, Ontario, were cleared of the charges when lab tests showed they were simply transporting chocolate.
Then, on Sept. 11, they were expecting to drive across the border in Lewiston, N.Y., on their way to a natural health festival. The connect hired a counsel to go with them in case-ending they were stopped again.
It did but more; not this only good.
Officers searched their bags, and ran drug tests on their food and toiletries. The chocolate again came up positive for drugs, as did a bottle of tea tree oil, a natural antiseptic and anti-fungal.
Officers arrested Obadia, and he is now home waiting for lab results that he says will exonerate him again. The elementary time he was arrested, "I was so naive," he says. "I thought somebody must have planted drugs in our bag. We didn’t know the tests could be faulty."
So far, the couple’session legal bills be in possession of topped $20,000, covered in division by Bronner’s company.
Customs spokesman Lloyd Easterling declined to a comment about the case or the use of the kits.
Others who own been wrongly accused:
*Cornelius Salonis of Shakopee, Minn., who spent two months in jail after police stopped him in August for driving drunk and assayed deodorant in his car that registered positive in quest of cocaine.
Mankato, Minn., public defender Richard Hillesheim says Salonis admitted to the drunken-driving crimination "but he was scared witless relative to this drug charge that came out of left field." Lab tests finally showed in that place was no cocaine.
*Punk rocker Don Bolles, who spent three days in jail in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2007 after his Dr. Bronner’session soap tested obstinate for GHB. The charges were dropped when lab tests found no drugs.
Government officials say there are not any records on the number of people who win been erroneously arrested for the lead to that of the tests. Garrison Courtney of the Drug Enforcement Agency says the touchstone kits are "not perfect, end they accord. you a considerably good form" whether a liable to suspicion substance is an illicit drug.
Allen Miller of Forensic Source, that makes kits, says they get "families of chemical compounds" and aren’t meant to be definitive. Any engage should subsist the effect of investigative police work, he says.
Adam Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union says, "Police officers and drug-test companies should not subject our congruous with the constitution rights to a game of chance."
Copyright 2008 USA Today
Source: http://drugtestingkits.org/false-results-put-focus-on-drug-arrests/
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