SFPD to test new device that will test people’s saliva for fentanyl

The San Francisco Police Department will be the first department in the country to pilot a new device that tests suspects’ saliva for fentanyl use.

A little over a year ago, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced that she wanted San Francisco police to start arresting people under the influence of drugs as part of an ongoing crackdown on fentanyl in the Tenderloin and South of Market. And the police department has equipment that can test for cocaine, methamphetamine or ketamine. But it wasn’t clear whether those machines, called the Dräger DrugTest 5000, could also test for fentanyl, a major driver of San Francisco’s drug overdose crisis.

So the SFPD asked the manufacturer, Dräger, if the machines tested for fentanyl. Dräger said no, they didn’t. Then they asked if the police department wanted machines that tested for fentanyl, machines that would have to be invented.

“And I said, ‘Yeah, we want to make this about fentanyl. There’s a big problem with fentanyl in the United States, and I think there’s a market for that,’” SFPD Crime Strategy Director Ryan Kao told the Chronicle. “And they said, ‘Well, maybe we could adapt that.’”

Now they’ve adjusted it, and the SFPD will now start testing suspects for fentanyl use, the Chronicle reports. The Dräger DrugTest 5000 has a new update that the SFPD will be testing, in which saliva samples are run through a portable machine to see if a person has fentanyl in their system.

This is just an initial test of a pilot program, and police won’t charge for the devices. They can be carried in patrol cars, so drug tests can be done in the field. According to Chron, the devices will test for “fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, opiates like heroin, oxycodone, methadone, benzodiazepines like Xanax and ketamine.”

It did not mention how recent fentanyl use had to be to trigger a positive test. Fentanyl use can show up in urine tests for up to 72 hours after use, although it is a saliva test that is likely to be more reliable.

The new tests are likely to prompt another chorus of complaints that the SFPD is focusing too much of its efforts on pursuing drug users and not enough on apprehending drug dealers. In the last year of the crackdown, the SFPD arrested 1,284 suspected drug users and 1,008 suspected drug dealers.

Though there seems to be a real question mark: Will drug charges be brought to court with the untested technology? More importantly, the device’s accuracy in detecting fentanyl has not been proven, although that’s part of what SFPD hopes to achieve with this pilot experiment.

Related: Mayor Breed reportedly wants to arrest people who are “under the influence of drugs” (SFist)

Image via Dragerman