Device Detects Drug Use Via Fingerprints 224
cylonlover writes "Fingerprints have been used to confirm or determine peoples' identities for over one hundred years now, but new technology is allowing them to be put to another use — drug testing. Intelligent Fingerprinting (a spin-off company affiliated with the UK's University of East Anglia) has just unveiled a prototype portable device that can detect the presence of illicit drugs or other substances in a person's system by analyzing the sweat in their fingerprints."
Re:How about for paramedics? (Score:5, Informative)
What kind of dystopian hell-hole do you live in where you can be jailed for having traces of drug metabolites in your system? Even Iran isn't *that* bad...
Victoria, Australia [trafficlaw.com.au]
Re:How about for paramedics? (Score:5, Informative)
That's how it works in Sweden. You go to Amsterdam over the weekend, smoke a couple of joints, come back to Sweden, hit the bars the next weekend, a cop sees you on the street and thinks you look "tired" (I have myself been threatened with arrest for drug use on my way home from work on a friday night when a police officer approached me and stated I looked, that's right, "tired". A joke I've heard from Swedish cannabis smokers is that Sweden is the only country in the world where you can get arrested for being happy or sleep-deprived), arrests you, you get to urinate into a cup, they find 11-COOH-THC or 11-OH-THC in your urine and that's it, you just got a conviction for drug use on your record.
The reason we have this system you ask? In the 80s the right-wing parties were falling behind in polls so they started ranting about rampant drug use and how use itself needed to be made illegal (despite the fact that at the time reported drug use among Swedes was at a multi-decade low), as always the left decided to join in on the "OMG DRUGS!!1" panic and a law was passed making drug use illegal (prior to that regular users were only arrested for possession, not use). A few years later they realized the law was rarely used since you could only be fined for drug use (which meant the police weren't allowed to force you to take a drug test) so they promptly added the possibility of jail time for drug use.
Why hasn't this been abolished? Because our politicians who deal with drug-related matters don't know anything about it beyond the political consensus that we need to "send the right signals" to people who use drugs (or might start using drugs) and happily dismiss the opinions of actual experts. Welcome to Sweden, where "signals" are more important than sanity (I don't remember which politician it was but one of them famously stated that she thought it was more important to send the right signals than it was to save lives).
Re:How about for paramedics? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, keywords are "driving *under* influence", right?
No ...
driving or being in charge of a motor vehicle when your saliva or blood contains any trace of illicit drugs
Peace,
Andy.
Re:Drugs in money (Score:4, Informative)