How Flawed Drug Testing Can Ruin Your Life

It's a problem all over the country, says Ross, especially in small towns. Police do a roadside drug test from a $2 kit and charge a suspect without ever getting it confirmed. One district attorney Ross worked with used these presumptive tests exclusively. "Even after my supervisor explained to him why he couldn't jail people based on those test, that DA just ignored us and kept on. Dude wanted convictions, not exonerations." Plus, police aren't scientists and might just plain do the test wrong. "I guess the lesson here for readers confronted with a screen test result," he says, "is if you know you're not taking drugs, don't confess or acquiesce until it's sent off for confirmation testing."

For example: Police in Texas once did a test on a mysterious material they found in a suspect's car, and their roadside kit called it methamphetamine. They threw the guy in lock-up, but then the confirmation test determined that the substance was kitty litter.

Why is that a problem? Well, take the following example, based on a real case. You're prescribed Percocet for an injury, and you keep taking it afterward because Percocet is addictive (a problem society has really got to work on). Police catch you with ten tablets. Each contains 10 milligrams of oxycodone, plus 650 milligrams of other stuff. But you get charged as though the entire thing is an opium derivative, as if you were carrying 6.6 grams of pure heroin. You get a minimum sentence of 70 months, plus a fine of $50,000. If that's not terrifying enough, let's up the number of tablets to 38. You'd now get over 18 years minimum in prison and a $500,000 fine. That's roughly the same as for trafficking 1,000 ecstasy pills, or 10,000 pounds of marijuana.

It's also true that you can get charged for microscopic traces of drugs -- say, residue in a baggie. If you're lucky, you'll get written up for drug paraphernalia, but you might instead get charged with drug possession and become a felon over 0.01 grams of heroin. Now listen to what happens when we combine microscopic drug traces with those aggregate weight laws:

"I once had about two grams of poorly made fake Xanax come in," says Ross. "These white tablets crumbled into powder easily, and my presumptive analysis only showed inert fillers." But the suspect had stuck these tablets of his in a baggie that once held heroin, so when Ross did more detailed tests to identify the fillers, he detected a tiny heroin trace. "Even though, based on my experience, I knew what the situation was, I couldn't prove which nano-specks of white powder were the heroin among the rest of the evidence. So guess what they got charged with?"

And speaking of huge charges over nothing ...

But the law's the law, so drug testers like Ross have to exhaustively analyze every suspected marijuana sample with the same scientific precision as potentially lethal substances like fentanyl -- even products sold legally in a neighboring state. Even packaged and labeled edibles, which openly advertise that they contain THC.

In Ross's state, THC -- the psychoactive compound in cannabis -- is categorized differently from marijuana and carries a different sentence. So drug testers must dig though brownies and vape liquid for microscopic traces of cannabis plant, because the penalty changes depending on whether they can confirm the THC came from cannabis. This happens to be one of the few situations in which those bizarre aggregate weight rules can help you.

Say they catch you with 450 grams of THC candy. The sentence for that quantity of THC is 5-99 years. But if Ross can discover any bits of botanical cannabis in there, the candy counts as marijuana, not THC. It's just 15.75 ounces, making it a lower state jail felony. It would take 2,000 pounds of candy classified as marijuana to get the same sentence as 450 grams classified as THC.

If you're re-reading that paragraph trying to make sense of those rules, honestly, you're wasting your time. Now imagine your lawyer trying to explain it to you while your hands are in cuffs.

But since the two did get caught in the end, there's a silver lining to all this. "Because of them, the crime lab system in Massachusetts is making needed bottom-up changes that frankly should already have been there." How many more corrupt testers are still out there is, of course, impossible to know.

Fake urine very much does exist. You can buy it online. You can also buy it in smoke shops or sex shops, where it will be marked for novelty or fetish use. Ross managed to get a budget approved and bought ten brands of this fake urine at a nearby smoke shop. ("Are you planning on having a party?" asked the heavily pierced and tattooed checkout lady with a wink.)

He tested them all. "Most had some kind of hand warmer to bring the fake urine up to temp. Others relied on keeping the urine strapped to your inner thigh to get up to body temp." So that took care of temperature, the first hurdle. They were also the right color. Ross ran through the other tests -- pH, specific gravity, the oxidant test, the creatinine test. "Lo and behold, eight out ten of the goddamn things passed. Like for real, these work as (not) advertised."

So could Ross devise a better test to catch even the most sophisticated fake urine? "I eventually did," he says. His method involves searching for a pee compound called urobilinogen, which can't be stored for extended periods and can't be cheaply synthesized. The chemical Ehrlich's reagent tests whether a tube of maybe-urine contains urobilinogen. Note: We are not giving you this information so you can go out and create a better, foolproof type of fake urine. Although, well, we can't stop you from trying.

Take what happened to Prince, for example. The superstar died from some kind of overdose, we were told. Yet when prosecutors closed the case, they revealed what had truly most likely happened: The artist had taken Vicodin, but the pills were counterfeit. They were laced with fentanyl, and he'd probably not known that, or not known how much was in them. That's what killed him.

Sometimes this happens because a dealer can't afford the real stuff. Sometimes they're trying a new mixture that will elude suspicion. Sometimes they skirt laws with a substitute that the DEA has yet to schedule. "It all means users have no idea what drug they're actually getting, or what dosage," says Ross. "The margin of error between getting high and getting buried is micrograms, and it's not like these fakes are made with laboratory precision."

One of the oddest samples Ross has handled involved fake Xanax. The drugs turned out to really be PCP and two types of sedative, and within a couple of months, they popped up in five different agencies in the jurisdiction. "The PCP analog is a powerful hallucinogen," he says, "while the other two would numb you up and put you to sleep. Can you imagine tripping balls while in or close to a dream state? It'd be horrifying." Ross dubbed them "nightmare pills," and yes, we realize that some of you now really want to try it.

Meanwhile, some of this stuff is so lethal that testers have to handle it like it's some kind of bioweapon. Ross and others use masks and fume hoods. They take CPR and Narcan training. In the lab, you're always prepared in case something goes horribly wrong. One chemist, says Ross, was handling some blotting paper that he thought was LSD with gloved hands. He then used said gloved hand to wipe some sweat from his unprotected brow.

That little touch was all it took. The guy exposed himself to a new, barely tested hallucinogenic compound. "He was on a bad trip for several days, and could have died." And he was a scientist wearing science armor and getting just a smidge of drugs by accident. "Street-level users," says Ross, "of course don't take these precautions." When they take that same drug, often thinking they're just doing MDMA? They get heart attacks, strokes, and many, many deaths.

So no matter what your attitude is toward drugs or drug laws, we can surely all agree on one thing: Don't put something in your body unless you're pretty damned sure of what it is and what it does.

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For more, check out 5 Awful Things I Learned About Drugs Working At A Pharmacy and Should Kratom Be Banned? Here's What The Experts Say.

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