Could You Be Arrested As A Drug Mule? The Answer May Surprise You…

Could you be arrested for carrying illegal substances next time you travel? The reality is that handcuffs, a perp walk, a cavity search and a jail stay is more likely than you might imagine. It develops that widely used Field Drug Test Kits are unreliable. These Kits, which you may have seen as they usd by everybody who might need to test for an illicit substance, such as Police, Military, and schools, consist of a small plastic bag and a small vial, the suspected drug is placed into the bag, the liquid the vial is added and if the mixture turns the appropriate color, you are on your way to jail. Today, I have learned that there is a fly in the ointment. I am sure that my Law Enforcement friends confirm just how long these tests have been employed, I know I have personally used them in the late seventies. It now develops that these tests will show false positives on a variety of organic products. A USA Today article detailed the trials and tribulations of a Canadian couple who have been involved in a terrible legal hassle just for this sort of non-crime. This couple was arrested at the airport when over a kilogram of organic chocolate in their carry on luggage tested positive as Hashish (Interestingly, the strife we have caused in the Middle East has made this a bumper year for the Hashish Industry. I have linked to a Christian Science Monitor article about that). You can imagine how the police would treat someone they caught with that amount of a Schedule 1 Narcotic. Oh, they were traveling with their infant son at the time. There the case where a man spent Two Months in jail after his deodorant tested positive as Cocaine. In another incident, a person was jailed because his soap tested positive as the Date Rape drug.

This will be interesting to watch, as the major vendor of these kits is Forensics Source, which was what Armor Forensics was renamed when BAE acquired it.