> 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?

For the accused: those with low resources would go to trial with less time to mount a defense. Disallowing plea deals would remove the possibility of coercing lower-severity conviction pleas.

For 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.

In the short term, prosecutors would have no choice but to drop a huge number of charges as they would be overwhelmed.

EDIT: here's an interesting data point where it looks like NYC passed a law that required prosecutors to have all evidence ready prior to the speedy trial date. It seems like it drove a lot of dismissals of low level stuff:

https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

> 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 they do

All of the simple drug tests are intended for use as screening tools, with positive results sent to labs for verification.

> Even colorimetric test makers say their products only screen for the possibility of illegal drugs – and should not be considered tools for verification.

> “NOTE: ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!” reads one warning for a pack of colorimetric tests.

They should have known this and followed proper procedure.

Also keep this in mind for your employment drug screening. This will typically use more advanced tests for the first pass, but if someone comes up positive then they should automatically send it to the more advanced and accurate screening step. The good testing companies do this automatically but I’ve heard stories where some cheap testing companies did not do this and falsely accused employees didn’t know to request the accurate screening step.

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.

The purpose of the system is what it does. Here, drug laws result in tens of thousands of wrongful arrests, some portion of which will take the plea deal even though they are innocent. Typically because they are low income and need to get out of holding so they don't lose their job.

Instead they get a record (for nothing) and risk prison. They cannot afford to prove their innocence.

This has Base Rate Fallacy written all over it.

If you had a drunk-driver-detection machine that output "positive" 95% of the time when the driver is drunk and output "negative" 100% of the time when the driver is not drunk, and started administering the test to all drivers on a road, the probability that a positive detection is accurate is only 1.96%. That sounds exactly like what was happening: dragnet testing of bird droppings and little old ladies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_2:_D...

If simple statistics are difficult for people to understand, the Base Rate Fallacy is right out.

If it's too expensive and time consuming to determine whether a crime has occurred with the appropriate tools, we shouldn't be prosecuting it. If you're not willing to go to the taxpayers and say we need $80k for a handheld device so we can do random checks, then random checks should not be occurring.

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. :/

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

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.

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.

I honestly think we could save a lot of lives by just putting a gas chromatography machine in the library next to the 3d printers and training people to use it.

but even the pricey tests can wrongfully have positives. if you eat sweets in which poppy seeds are ingredients you test positive for opioids (although near to the detection limit)

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.

Drug war is a war on our democracy.

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