Now, I'm not a chemistry major...but I took the usual chemistry courses in high school and college on my way to my EET degree, and I've spent more than three decades in the nuclear power field, both as an operator and an engineer. So I'm not buying that a chemical field test would give a false positive for cocaine on a pile of drywall gypsum. Chemistry doesn't work that way.
You are joking right? You don't listen to the news at all?
You know that the field tests pop hot on at least 80 other substances besides the narcotics right? Common household cleaning items. Acne medications. And many others.
The field tests are laughably inaccurate.
How about the guy charged for meth when it was Krispy Kreme glaze. That's my favorite! LOL! Chemistry my big ole butt! LOL! SUGAR! LOL!
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news...k-doughnut-glaze-for-meth-20160727-story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-donut-glaze-for-meth/?utm_term=.57ebe9d9354f
I can snow you under with stories of false positives that are then cleared by the lab. What's even worse, we don't know the amount of folks who take the plea deal and it never even makes it all the way through lab testing since they no longer need it.
"A
federal survey in 2013 found that about 62 percent of crime labs do not test drug evidence when the defendant pleads guilty."
And read, really read some of these articles. Even law enforcement standards agencies have been talking about the inaccuracies since the 1970s!
"In a
1974 study, however, the National Bureau of Standards warned that the kits “should not be used as sole evidence for the identification of a narcotic or drug of abuse.” Police officers were not chemists, and chemists themselves had long ago stopped relying on color tests, preferring more reliable mass spectrographs. By 1978, the Department of Justice had determined that field tests
“should not be used for evidential purposes,” and the field tests in use today remain inadmissible at trial in nearly every jurisdiction; instead, prosecutors must present a secondary lab test using more reliable methods."
https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives
"Field tests provide quick answers. But if those answers and confessions cannot be trusted, Charles McClelland, the former Houston police chief, says, officers should not be using them. During an interview in March, McClelland said that if he had known of the false positives Houston’s officers were generating, he would have ordered a halt to all field testing departmentwide. Police officers are not chemists, McClelland said. “Officers shouldn’t collect and test their own evidence, period. I don’t care whether that’s cocaine, blood, hair.”
"The Harris County district attorney’s office is responsible for
half of all exonerations by conviction-integrity units nationwide in the past three years — not because law enforcement is different there but because the Houston lab committed to testing evidence after defendants had already pleaded guilty, a position that is increasingly unpopular in forensic science."
"Based in part on the information gathered by Marie Munier, the former prosecutor Anderson hired to examine the drug convictions, we determined that 301 of the 416 variants began as arrests by the Houston Police Department, with the rest coming from surrounding municipalities, and that 212 of those 301 arrests were based on evidence that lab analysis determined was not a controlled substance, or N.C.S."
"74 percent of the convicted didn’t possess any drugs at the time of their arrest"
https://www.forensicmag.com/article...ests-confuse-candy-meth-cause-serious-concern
The videotaped tests showed that mundane items found in supermarkets, including coffee, aspirin, chocolate and oregano, can come up positive for narcotics using the most common tests available to law enforcement. Even Mucinex DM, an over-the-counter cough medication, came up positive for heroin and morphine, they said.
How about 2 month in jail because vitamins showed up as amphetamines?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ntified-as-contraband/?utm_term=.bd021f44ad74
"It isn’t the first time one of these field tests has caused a wrongful arrest. Or the second. Or the third. In fact, I’ve been compiling a running list of all the materials that one or more of these field tests has mistaken for drugs. It includes . . .
Why, it’s almost as if these field tests will say whatever law enforcement officers want them to."
How many more you want? I can do this all day long.
Chemistry! '
LOLOLOLOLOL!
Chemistry that puts innocent people in jail for months, changing their lives forever, losing jobs, losing houses, and applying for jobs with a felony on their record!
Chemistry did it! Hahahahaha! Chemistry searched your car! Chemistry locked you up!
If chemistry ever asks to search my car, I think I'm gonna say NO! Hahahahaha!
Cops too for that matter.
But remember folks, if you ain't done nothin wrong you ain't got nothin to hide! LOLOLOLLOL!
Oh man, that's rich. Chemistry.