All that I want to add to Evan's conclusion is that on the laboratory challenge that they would have liked a roadside device for drugs, the reason we do not want the scientists to support launching any cheap old unreliable piece of instrumentation is that you'll end up with as many false positives as false negatives. That's our honest belief at the moment.
Furthermore, it would be restricted to oral fluids, because that's all you could ask a person at the roadside to give. The problem is, and I give this example, if you just smoked marijuana, you still have the remainder of that substance in your mouth, but it has nothing to do with your impairment because it's really not absorbed yet. You just smoked it five minutes ago and it hasn't really gone up in the bloodstream. I'm not advocating anything as to what you should do in your private life, but I do not want anybody to be wrongly accused of a substance because of a detection device at the roadside.
What I'm saying is that those devices are not ready yet. We are encouraging research for sure, but there's limitation at the moment in detection of various drugs that are at so low a level to be active in the system. I challenge anybody here.... The instruments we're using are from $100,000 to $500,000 to make sure we do our job right in an accredited laboratory. How are you going to have something at the roadside on the drug side at the moment? That's why I said it may come later.
I think at the moment the best we can offer society is the three steps: a standard field sobriety test at the level of suspicion of impairment, corroboration with the full 12-step test by the DRE, and corroboration with an accredited forensic laboratory. That is all in keeping and that's the best we can offer right now. I hope we can offer more in another five to ten years as far as magical boxes go.
The drugs, by the way, are not volatile. Volatile means that it evaporates from the blood to the air in the lungs and can be given to an instrument. The drugs are not like that. They're big huge monsters and they like to stay in the blood; they don't go in the air, and so there is nothing that you can get on the breath—except for alcohol.
I hope I haven't oversimplified that.
Thank you.