Posted on 10/19/2019 1:48:44 PM PDT by NobleFree
PHILADELPHIA — When New Jersey lawmakers debated earlier this year whether to legalize recreational use of marijuana, the Garden State’s police organizations were adamantly against it.
The cops said legal weed might lead to an explosion in the numbers of impaired drivers operating under the influence. And the police would be caught flatfooted trying to tell whether drivers they pulled over were high.
“With alcohol, if you have over 0.08% in your blood, there’s the presumption that you’re intoxicated,” said Christopher Leusner, head of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police.
But because marijuana stays in the bloodstream for weeks after impairment, “there hasn’t been a blood test or a breath test that can determine if you’re impaired by marijuana.”
Now there is.
It’s a breathalyzer device developed by Hound Labs in Northern California. It’s portable and can run tests for both alcohol and marijuana. It just may change the minds of many of those reluctant police officers, including in Pennsylvania as lawmakers consider several proposals to legalize recreational marijuana use.
Intrinsic Capital Partners, a Philadelphia growth equity fund, is so convinced of a “potential massive market” for the device that it led a $30-million Series D financing round to bring it to market in 2020.
Mike Lynn, a veteran emergency-department physician from Oakland, California, developed the Hound in collaboration with researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco.
Lynn also happens to be a reserve deputy sheriff.
“It’s about creating a balance of public safety and fairness,” Lynn said. “I’ve seen the tragedies resulting from impaired driving up close. And I have a good idea how challenging it is at the roadside to know whether someone smoked pot recently. But I believe if someone is not stoned, they shouldn’t be arrested.”
Lynn claims his device can detect whether someone has smoked pot or ingested a marijuana edible in the last three hours.
A Canadian start-up called SannTek has a device in development with similar capabilities.
The Hound is a base station and a hand-held device that together will retail for about $5,000. The entire machine will be manufactured in the United States, Lynn said. Each test also will require a $20 single-use cartridge.
“We have spoken with law-enforcement agencies and large employers, and from our perspective, there’s a huge untapped market and unmet needs for something like this,” said Howard Goodwin, principal at Intrinsic Capital Partners.
Dick Wolf, the creator of TV’s “Law & Order,” is also an enthusiastic Hound backer. So is Benchmark, the Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouse that put up seed funding forDropbox, Snap, Uber and WeWork.
“It’s a game changer,” said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively on marijuana legalization.
“I’ve been saying for years it’s only a matter of time before someone developed the technology and got the science right,” Hudak said. “That time apparently is now. And they’re going to make a hell of a lot of money selling it to law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. and Canada.”
Goodwin said about 50 million drug tests are conducted each year. He believes the market for a THC breathalyzer may be worth well above $10 billion annually.
About 30 states have legalized cannabis medically or recreationally, with Massachusetts in the latter group. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Rhode Island are among the dozens with medical marijuana programs.
Traditionally, law-enforcement agencies have been resistant to legalization.
Leusner, the head of the New Jersey police chiefs group, said prosecuting marijuana DUIs is costly and time-consuming.
Marijuana DUI cases hinge on blood test results. Traces of THC metabolites, the drug’s byproducts, can remain in the body for up to a month. Proving impairment is notoriously difficult. There is no legal threshold of what constitutes intoxication. Often, cases get thrown out of court.
Officers who are qualified drug-recognition experts and trained to spot stoned drivers can spend up to two days in court in a single case. “That’s expensive,” Leusner said.
John Adams, Berks County’s district attorney, serves on Pennsylvania’s statewide medical marijuana advisory board.
“DUI under marijuana is a huge, huge problem. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been against legalization,” Adams said. “I’ve heard about the breathalyzers. If the technology is out there, it would be a great tool. It would alleviate some of our fears.”
Police have depended on the skunky stench of marijuana to provide probable cause to search a car or conduct a field sobriety test on a driver. But a recent court ruling in Pennsylvania maintained that the smell alone isn’t sufficient reason to initiate an arrest.
And then there’s this: cannabis consumers in many states are slowly moving toward edibles — from pot brownies to infused beverages and lozenges — and at least until the recent scare, vaping.
So both the Hound and the SannTek appear to be arriving at the perfect moment.
The Hound breathalyzer, which is about a billion times more sensitive than a standard alcohol breath test, can detect the incredibly low concentrations of THC that are transported through the bloodstream and subsequently exhaled.
“We wanted to be able to detect THC in people who have recently used it — either eaten the stuff or smoked a joint,” said Lynn. “Those are the people we want to discourage before they go to the workplace or get behind the wheel.”
Lynn said he envisioned the device nearly eight years ago when a car drove past him trailing a cloud of weed smoke. But the technology did not exist to create an affordable device.
“I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be.”
In eight months, Lynn’s team was able to detect THC in the breath of smokers. It took five more years to consistently and accurately measure levels with a machine at a cost in reach of most police departments and employers.
“We could measure small amounts quickly, but it took considerably longer to do the science and complete the clinical studies,” Lynn said.
Lynn sees the nation’s police departments as his first customers, but he believes businesses will adopt the Hound.
“Employers have the same fundamental problems as law-enforcement agencies,” Lynn said. “They need to maintain a safe workplace, but not have to worry about what their employees do in their free time. Someone can go home, smoke pot just like I’d enjoy a glass of wine, and not test positive” the next day.
“Employers are facing a workforce now that has close to full employment,” Lynn said. “They don’t want to be firing valuable workers, especially for something that’s legal in most states.”
This actually makes a good test case.
I think all of us here know how the script has been flipped.
Government at ALL levels is supposed to serve US ... We the People. We the People are NOT supposed to be the servants of government.
Do We the People want the government to have yet another intrusion in our lives?
No matter how you feel about pot, this is yet another opportunity for the government to take control of US.
Long ago, we began referring to the people who are supposed to be serving US as “lawmakers.”
We have ALL the laws and then some that a society would need in a thousand years.
I for one am quite ready for a moratorium on “lawmaking.”
Yes. That’s a DUI under current law pretty much everywhere.
Usually when smoke pours out of the car and it reeks of marijuana, that tips me off they have been recently using.
“a breathalyzer device developed by Hound Labs.” Sweet. About time. Get one in every police car, school and workplace. And get tons of profits to Hound Labs.
Officer Friendly to you, or your mother, or your adolescent child driver:
“I have reason to believe you have consumed marijuana in the last three hours. You cannot proceed until you give me $20. and blow into this device”.
That certainly sounds like highway robbery to me.
Actually it’s totally third world warlord territory, where you have to pay your way through the checkpoints set up by each area’s petty local tyrant’s militias.
The Fascists would have thrived in this world we are creating.
OK, but it is just marijuana. There is no difference between regular marijuana and “medical” marijuana, so if any labels are saying anything other than “don’t smoke/eat this and operate machinery” then they are blatantly irresponsible.
In 2018, there were 35 traffic fatalities in Colorado where someone was DUI weed https://gazette.com/news/mixed-findings-on-colorado-marijuana-traffic-deaths/article_ec6a8f4c-a722-11e8-9c81-17b5312abb33.html
The opioid caution label reads. May cause drowsiness. Use care when operating a vehicle, vessel(eg:boat) or operate machinery
That's just wrong. A test that will detect 5 nanograms of THC per milliliter in the bloodstream is needed--not a loophole developed by the drug abuse racket in a no-go zone.
Not sure I follow you - are you saying that any device developed by Californians is therefore a "loophole"?
And what's the "loophole" - the device would never return a positive result? Wouldn't law enforcement agencies catch on to this quite quickly, thereby thwarting the "loophole"?
“In 2018, there were 35 traffic fatalities in Colorado where someone was DUI weed https://gazette.com/news/mixed-findings-on-colorado-marijuana-traffic-deaths/article_ec6a8f4c-a722-11e8-9c81-17b5312abb33.html";
Specifically, ‘traffic fatalities in which drivers had enough marijuana in their bloodstream to be deemed legally impaired dropped sharply, from 52 in 2016 to 35 last year.’
My comment was part humor and part frustration. Many of us have seen young, impressionable people ruined after being enticed or pressured into drug abuse by others surrounding them. The 5 nanogram standard is for finding users rather than those who are more immediately and extremely affected. Otherwise, the problem will continue to solve itself in ways only seen by straight, sober and thoughtful people.
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