NCJ Number
173612
Journal
Alternatives to Incarceration Volume: 4 Issue: 2 Dated: March/April 1998 Pages: 12-17
Date Published
1998
Length
4 pages
Annotation
After reviewing the ways in which drug testing is used in the criminal justice system, this article describes some of the newer technologies for drug testing, including hair analysis, the sweat patch, saliva testing, and the use of the ion mobility spectrometer.
Abstract
By 1989 the newly established Office of National Drug Control Policy recommended "comprehensive use" of drug testing for virtually all categories of people in the criminal justice system. Currently, drug testing is conducted at all stages of criminal justice processing, from the pretrial stage through incarceration and release. Some of the newer technologies of drug testing may be more cost-effective and less invasive than traditional urinalysis. Hair analysis as a means of testing for drug consumption is based in the fact that growing hair absorbs drugs and the metabolites are embedded in the hair shaft permanently. Hair analysis can detect drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Another technology gaining interest is the sweat patch. Sweat is a mechanism for eliminating waste from the body and contains drugs and drug metabolites, much like urine, and can be analyzed with similar technologies. Also, saliva testing is relatively simple to collect and does not pose the problems of privacy and intrusion as does urine testing. The ion mobility spectrometer (IMS) is an automated instrument for chemical analysis that shares some of the design and operational characteristics of a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry instrument. Like GC/MS, it depends on separation of materials moving through space to detect a unique marker of a "fingerprint" uniquely associated with a known chemical compound. The primary advantages of IMS are that it is very sensitive, has high analytic specificity, and can identify many compounds simultaneously and rapidly. It also has the potential to test many different types of specimens. The article concludes with a discussion of policy challenges and the future.