Discussion

These common drug tests lead to tens of thousands of wrongful arrests a year, experts say. One state is fighting back

kennywinker: > The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results.Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently the do

djoldman: > For those who get arrested due to colorimetric testing, “over 90% of people are taking a plea deal because they can’t afford to remain in jail and wait six months for laboratory tests,” Walsh said.This touches on a question to which I'd love to know the answer: what would happen if those charged with crimes could not waive their right to a speedy trial and plea deals were disallowed?Cost to the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense.Cost to the prosecutor: less time to mount a prosecution.Benefits to courts and jails: much cleaner and more open dockets, jails cleared out much quicker.Presumably this would lead to more rational charges - fewer charges and charges that were higher priority and easier to prove.

AlBugdy: AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.If these tests can't reliably show you're high at the time the test was taken, don't use them.For anything other than driving or operating heavy machinery and so on, there's no point in such tests at all. Let people take whatever drugs they want. Just do what we do with legal drugs like alcohol and cigarettes - regulate the quality, require an ID card for purchase and tax them.This will obviously lower organized crime. If you make prostitution legal, you'll lower it even more. There will still be people trying to sell their shitty home made drugs cheaper than the regulated ones - like we have illegal cigarettes, but that's nothing compared to what we have now.Make drugs less of a taboo. Educate people on harm reduction and make it easy to admit when you have a problem with something.As a somewhat-educated person without medical education, I've taken almost everything under the sun and still function well within society. It's really possible to use drugs responsibly. If the image you have is a junkie with ragged clothes lying on some old mattress under a bridge sharing a dirty needle, you're only looking at the uneducated people with no safety net from society. Believe it or not, educated drug users are everywhere. We just don't often talk about it like we don't casually mention our fetishes to others in work or academia.But drugs and sex are fun, maybe too fun, and we can't let the citizens enjoy themselves too much. :/

Zigurd: The companies that make these tests need to be sued out of existence.

mikkupikku: Cynical outcome: the system can't handle the case load and instead of scaling, it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble. Justice between commoners is effectively abandoned as a duty by the state, and left to vigilantism.

drfloyd51: If you relate funding to arrests, more arrests will be made.Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?At least then there is an objective 3rd party that has to agree with the charge.Of course… the judges and the cops are paid by the same entity. And the judges and the cops know each other through their work.

__MatrixMan__: They're also pretty awful if you try to use them for safety purposes. Like... how blue can purple be before it's not purple anymore, idk. Last year it was very purple, but now the test is a year older, or is the product non-uniform and that's why it's different...Basically, if you inject enough suspicion into any situation, colorimetric tests will eventually lead you to believe that you're in trouble. And then later if you bring the sample to somebody with access to real equipment it often turns out there was no trouble besides the sort you were looking for in the first place.

projektfu: Fundamentally, the problem is that we have too many arrests. An officer arresting someone on the spot because of suspicion should only be done when they are assumed to be endangering people or likely to be victimizing more people. Someone carrying a small amount of drugs is not doing that if they are not visibly impaired.If they want to take a sample into evidence and have it tested, it can wait a few weeks for real testing and then they can issue a bench warrant.We really need to start asking for this to be the norm in the US.

t-3: Part of the problem is that public defence is extremely stressful and not particularly well paid, as well as being less prestigious than prosecution.Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already failed a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later.If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?

watwut: > Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help?More quilty verdicts would be made. Regardless of guilt

Aurornis: > AFAIK some types of drug tests can't measure whether you're high on $drug now or if you're taken it before and you're sober now. If you're driving sober but you've taken $drug yesterday, you might be arrested for DWI.This is true for THC (marijuana) tests that look for metabolites of THC with long half-lives. It takes a very long time for the body to metabolize THC through the different steps and then eliminate those metabolites.For many of the drugs named in the article their elimination is rapid. For some like fentanyl their concentrations are also low. If someone has an appreciable concentration of fentanyl detectable by a simple test they are very inebriated.

throwaway9980: Ruining innocent people’s lives is what government is best at doing. Don’t think of as convenient. Think of it as realization of purpose.

swores: Sorry but that's bullshit.It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.

20after4: A system’s purpose is what it does, not what it claims to do.

wat10000: Waiving rights is weird. It’s well understood that you can’t waive your right not to be a slave, for example. Why should you be able to waive any right? The 6th amendment doesn’t say “unless the accused doesn’t want it.”

cogman10: Because it's presumably beneficial. It gives your lawyers extra time to prepare for the case or to potentially settle on more favorable terms.

wat10000: Waiving your right not to be a slave could be beneficial too.

cogman10: You can become someone's slave if you really want to. The only part that can't be enforced is you can't be coerced to stay.Plenty of cults have slaves in the US. But because the are willing, nothing is done about it.

Zigurd: More specificity would help. Cops, cop culture, incompetent and purposely harmful training, and the appalling nature of our criminal "justice" system is what ruins lives. Some other parts of government might be just as bad, but in other ways for other reasons.

cogman10: > it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a nobleOh I got news for you, that already happened.Anyone that's had their car broken into, bike stolen, or house burgled can tell you that cops won't do anything.And if you look at serious crimes like homicide, you'll find a clearance rate of about 66%. And that's their self reported clearance rate. It's not successful prosecution. That's just the "we've looked into this enough and have decreed we think this person did it". It's a lot worse if you look at crimes like rape.The crimes that police actually police are property crimes. Specifically for the nobles. Cops are pretty good at responding to stores being robbed or a crime against a wealthy and well connected person. Steal $1000 from a target and you'll get the book thrown at you. Steal a $1000 bike in front of the same target and cops will shrug and say there's nothing they can do about it.

walletdrainer: If you have a right to both a fair trial and a speedy trial, there should be no trial that does not provide both.

tsss: This is already happening in Germany.

kennywinker: Criminal legal system is what i’ve been using.

kennywinker: Right, on an individual level that makes sense - but whoever saw the error rate for this test (or lied about it to sell it) and approved it for use by police deserves jail time themselves.You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.

SoftTalker: Your example is flawed because Target has cameras and a security staff watching for shoplifters, and they will detain you as you walk out the door, and they will provide video and eyewitness testimony to the prosecutor. It's a slam dunk case.The shoplifters who do manage to walk out undetected are of no interest to the police, as there's no basis for a case against them.

beej71: I suspect if you disallow arrests based on these tests and require a lab followup, the tests will cease to be used entirely.The police know the false positive rate and they'll stop wasting their time and rely on their training and instincts, instead.There's an implication of automation bias here, too. "It came back blue, so I can just make an arrest knowing that the blue bag told me I should. Not my fault if it's wrong."Pushing farther, if the law said that if there was a false positive, the arresting officer would have to spend one day in jail per day the suspect was jailed, no cop would ever dare use this test. That demonstrates the amount of trust they actually have in it.

mirpa: Why do you have to wait in jail for lab result?

AdrianB1: It looks like a classic case of "guilty until proven otherwise". Arrests should never be made based just on "it may be", but on some solid evidence. It is much safer to make the arrest when the lab confirms the problem, not when there is a hint there may be one.