Unreliable and Unchallenged: Police Field Drug Tests Are Sending Innocent People to Prison

At the outset of the 1990s, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department began making thousands of arrests every year using inexpensive test kits meant to detect illegal drugs. Officers simply had to drop suspected cocaine or methamphetamine — taken from someone’s pocket or the floorboards of their car — into a pouch of chemicals and watch for telltale changes in colors. Known as “field tests,” police embraced them as essential in busting drug users and dealers. Local judges became sold on the kits’ usefulness and prosecutors relied on them to quickly secure guilty pleas — hundreds upon hundreds, year after year....
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/unreliable-unchallenged-police-field-drug-tests-innocent-people-prison