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Common drug tests lead to tens of thousands wrongful arrests a year
- kennywinker 6mo ago> 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
- duskdozer 6mo agoYou know, why not just make it a lot faster and more convenient and just go by the expert assessment of the officer on scene? No need for all the bloat.
- fragmede 6mo agoI would dread the arrival of this officer/judge arriving on the scene.
- drfloyd51 6mo agoI. AM. THE LAW. Dreddful.
- Jimmc414 6mo agoIs this satire?
- Zigurd 6mo agoBecause this is HN, and especially because it's HN's audience reading it, this is a perfectly cromulent question.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo agoOne hopes it's satire. Can't tell, unfortunately.
- duskdozer 6mo agoFair, was probably a bit too deadpan. Yes, satire.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- t-3 6mo agoPart of the problem is that public defence is extremely stressful and not particularly well paid, as well as being less prestigious than prosecution. Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later. If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?
- kennywinker 6mo agoRight, on an individual level that makes sense - but whoever saw the error rate for this test (or lied about it to sell it) and approved it for use by police deserves jail time themselves. You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
- _DeadFred_ 6mo agoGet together a law firm to do a class action on behalf of all the people wrongfully convicted. Make it too expensive for companies to provide these sorts of services to the government. But the companies will be covered as 'agents of the state' and given qualified immunity.
- kennywinker 6mo agoSo, an unaccountable system.
- alwa 6mo agoAnd, to put a charitable gloss on it—many of your clients who protest their innocence did actually have something true-positive on them. TFA cites manufacturers claiming a 4% false positive rate in lab conditions, and protesters claiming a 15-18% FPR in field conditions [*]. Offensive and intolerable in the aggregate, yes; but as far as base odds for any specific case in front of me? Assuming 18% of my defendants truly didn’t have drugs or drug residue on them, that still means 4 out of 5 of them did—and that the extra months of sitting in jail and fighting would lead nowhere for them. What’s 6 months of diversion by comparison? Even beyond the odds, how many of defendants’ claims are precise enough to implicate test accuracy specifically? “No, man, I swear I don’t do that stuff anymore” might be completely true and still result in a marginal-but-confirmatory lab result for the swab of the ol’ contraband satchel or whatever. Seems to me that’s the sort of stuff that the plea-negotiation part is for: instead of hoping expensive and slow science will give you certainty (or context), it’s “hey prosecutor, even if the test is right, we’re talking residue not bricks… diversion and call it a day?” I feel like, from the outside (and fed a steady diet of Law and Order television show), people grossly overestimate the degree of certainty embedded in a criminal conviction. I’m reminded of the classic Kalven and Zeisel study (1967) [1] finding, among other things, that judges and juries who sat through the exact same trial disagreed on guilt or innocence in up to 25% of cases. False convictions are outrageous, and I understand our individual instincts here to say “go to the mat for the truth!” But people are complicated, context is hazy, and there’s some irreducible residual rate at which any approach to justice gets it wrong. Which adds up to a lot more individuals than we’d like to assume. One of many reasons not to confuse the person with the bureaucratic record of the person. [*] Or, as the CNN person writes, a “91% error rate” per an NYCDOI study… guessing because there they were over-applying the tests in situations with extremely low base rates? At first I assumed this was a typical case of journalistic innumeracy, but reading through the study [0], they’re absolutely right and worth a quick aside: 91% really was the actual false positive rate the lab found in actual field tests. Surface swabs in a jail mail interdiction program, only examining the fentanyl tests, but still. It’s a wild read in all sorts of ways: there was a known reaction between the field test and chemicals in paper, but they used it for the mail anyway; the more false positives they saw, the more they panicked that all the mail had fentanyl in it. 89% of all the initial DOC field tests came back positive, 91% of those positives turned out to be false ones. The administration interpreted this to mean that all the inmates’ families were clearly “soaking envelopes in liquid fentanyl,” then mailing them to inmates to “chew.” The misconception led them all the way to trying to ban physical mail in the system. [0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTestingRpt11.20.2024.pdf https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTesting... [1] https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-american-jury-by-harry-kalven-jr-and-hans-zeisel/ https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-am... and replicated recently https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/ https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/
- throwaway9980 6mo agoRuining innocent people’s lives is what government is best at doing. Don’t think of as convenient. Think of it as realization of purpose.
- swores 6mo agoSorry but that's bullshit. It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose. But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
- 20after4 6mo agoA system’s purpose is what it does, not what it claims to do.
- therealdrag0 6mo ago[flagged]
- salawat 6mo agoWill say every benefactor of people not thinking that way. The rest of us, on the other hand, look at the objective results and realize if you want them to change, you have to change the system.
- therealdrag0 6mo agoWell duh. “A system will do what it does” is true, but that should not be conflated with its intent or purpose or design which require understanding of human intent. And humans produce unintended results all the time.
- djoldman 6mo ago> 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/2025/04/Discovery_Report-1.pdf https://datacollaborativeforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
- mikkupikku 6mo agoCynical outcome: the system can't handle the case load and instead of scaling, it just refuses to adjudicate any dispute that doesn't involve a noble. Justice between commoners is effectively abandoned as a duty by the state, and left to vigilantism.
- seany 6mo agoThis seems implicitly preferable than the beauacratic death of the alternative.
- saltwatercowboy 6mo agoNeither are acceptable, so a third way must be found
- mikkupikku 6mo ago
- AlBugdy 6mo agoAFAIK 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. :/
- drfloyd51 6mo agoIf you relate funding to arrests, more arrests will be made. Perhaps shifting funding to relate to guilty verdicts could help? At least then there is an objective 3rd party that has to agree with the charge. Of course… the judges and the cops are paid by the same entity. And the judges and the cops know each other through their work.
- Zigurd 6mo agoThe companies that make these tests need to be sued out of existence.
- projektfu 6mo agoFundamentally, 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.
- swores 6mo agoI agree with your thinking in the context of "keeping drug policy broadly the same but improving policing of it". But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not. The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services. I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries. (To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)
- __MatrixMan__ 6mo agoThey'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.
- Aurornis 6mo agoAll 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.
- AtlasBarfed 6mo agoDrug war is a war on our democracy.
- beej71 6mo agoI 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.
- ahhhhnoooo 6mo agoThe 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.
- subscribed 6mo agoJohn Oliver did a fantastic segment on that and called it torture AFAIR.
- _DeadFred_ 6mo agoDon't forget the 'trail tax'. Sentences are 10-20-50 years if you exercise your right to trial, while if you 'voluntarily' waive your right the plea put before you could be 1-5 years. Even if you are innocent, you are now at the point while in jail you already lost your job, your car, your house, are you going to risk that a system that did that to you already is going to give you a fair trial? Or are you going to go off of past experience that system is going to fuck you and just take the shorter bit?
- duskdozer 6mo agoarguably what killed Aaron Swartz: >On September 12, 2012, federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, increasing Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines.[16][104][105] During plea negotiations with Swartz's attorneys, the prosecutors offered to recommend a sentence of six months in a low-security prison if Swartz pled guilty to 13 federal crimes.
- wolfi1 6mo agobut 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)
- mirpa 6mo agoWhy do you have to wait in jail for lab result?
- kackerlacker 6mo agoPolice have to be winning the war on drugs but not literally taking that financing that doesn't require congressional oversight away from the CIA.
- AdrianB1 6mo agoIt 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.
- jjk166 6mo agoIf 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.
- Atheros 6mo agoThis 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:_Drunk_drivers 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.
- pandaman 6mo agoI don't follow. The example in the wikipedia uses the opposite error rates to what you have given: it falsely flags a sober driver in 5% of cases. And it works because the stipulated rate of drunkenness is much lower than 5% (0.1%) so the false positives overwhelm the true positives. In your setup the positive detection should be accurate at 95%, the negative error (a drunk driver passed as sober) - would be around 0.005%, where did you get 1.96%? Furthermore, as Wikipedia article noted, this assumes total testing. I highly doubt cops are walking around and drug test everyone they see.
- Atheros 6mo agoYou're right! I wrote it backwards! I swapped the 95 and 100% in the post above. My claim is that the cops in the article are walking around drug testing widely. Not literally everyone they see but if they are testing every white residue they see during any interaction with anyone, including bird droppings on the hood of someone's car, we've reached that point for all statistical purposes. The base rate fallacy will start applying.
- pandaman 6mo agoBase rate fallacy will start applying when the test's false positive rate is comparable to the frequency of the event. In the US cops usually don't show up at all when called, for cops to show up and do drug testing somebody needs to do something outrageous and the probability of the same person doing drugs is pretty high IMHO so the test with 4% error rate is going to be just fine. Of course, for the drugs conviction, the actual drugs need to be found but from what I understand, this article is about somebody arrested based on a drug test, then charged with a different crime and a sneaky lawyer, unable to fight the charges, trying to throw the case based on the "faulty test".