Salt in the Wounds

Sunday 1 August 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + War on Drugs

Not only do we have ridiculous laws prohibiting marijuana use, the system is stacked against us by the use of shitty-fuck field tests which are iffy at best.

The Duquenois test was developed in the late 1930s by a French pharmacist, Pierre Duquénois, while he was working for the United Nations division of narcotics. In 1950, he completed a study for the UN which claimed that his test was “very specific” for marijuana; it was adopted by the UN and crime labs around the world as the preferred test for marijuana.

After undergoing several modifications, including the use of chloroform, the test became known as the Duquenois-Levine test, and became widely popular. Though scientists would show in the 1960s and 1970s that the D-L test was nonspecific, meaning it rendered false positives, it remains today the most commonly used test for marijuana — used in many of the 800,000 marijuana arrests that take place each year.

The test is a simple chemical color reagent test, easy to perform but difficult to interpret. To administer the test, a police officer simply has to break a seal on a tiny micropipette of chemicals, and insert a particle of the suspected substance; if the chemicals turn purple, this indicates the possibility of marijuana. But the color variations can be subtle, and readings can vary by examiner.

The field test kits are produced by a variety of manufacturers, the most popular brands being NIK and ODV. Literature about the D-L from NIK’s makers states that it is only a “screening” test that “may or may not yield a valid result” and may produce “false positive results.” Yet, since at least 1990, arresting officers, with the support of prosecutors, have regularly bypassed lab analysts and have purported to identify marijuana at hearings and trials only on the basis of visual inspection and the nonspecific D-L field test.

It’s not enough that the drug war rhetoric has turned literal, and that the government has actively created enemies out of people who simply want to live in fucking peace, and that we have the largest prison population on fucking Earth, largely due to non-violent drug offenders, but they also feel the need, in their zeal to protect people from TEH eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil marijuana, to cheat the system in order to realize their goal.

Fuck. You. Drug. Warriors.

2010-08-01  »  madlibertarianguy