Company Says It’s Built a Marijuana Breathalyzer That Will Hit the Market In 2020

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: There’s currently no field test equipment that detects marijuana impairment. A company in California thinks it has a solution. From San Francisco Chronicle: “By mid-2020, Hound Laboratories plans to begin selling what it says is the world’s first dual alcohol-marijuana breath analyzer, which founder Dr. Mike Lynn says can test whether a user has ingested THC of any kind in the past two to three hours. ‘We’re allowed to have this in our bodies,’ Lynn said of marijuana, which became legal to use recreationally in California in 2018. ‘But the tools to differentiate somebody who’s impaired from somebody who’s not don’t exist.'” We won’t know if these claims are true until the testing equipment is deployed. And even then, we still won’t know if the machines are accurate or the drivers they catch are actually impaired. Marijuana doesn’t work like alcohol, so impairment levels vary from person to person. In addition, there’s no baseline for impairment like there is for alcohol. That will have to be sorted out by state legislatures before officers can begin to claim someone is “impaired” just because the equipment has detected THC. At this point, the tech pitched by Hound Labs only provides a yes/no answer. There’s a very good chance this new tech will go live before the important details — the ones safeguarding people’s rights and freedoms — are worked out. The founder of Hound Labs is also a reserve deputy for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. And it’s this agency that’s been test driving the weedalyzer. “[T]his new tech should be greeted with the proper amount of skepticism,” the report says. “Breathalyzers that detect alcohol have been around for decades and are still far from perfect. A new device that promises to detect recent marijuana use just because researchers say consumption can be detected for up to three hours shouldn’t be treated as a solution.” “The device is stepping into a legal and legislative void with no established baseline for marijuana ‘intoxication.'”