Just what we needed, a new way to suppress the population and put more people out of work and into prison. How awesome. Maybe we could even hook these up at all government offices, so you can't register to vote or renew your drivers license without an instant drug test. Won't that be wonderful.

Sail The Wide Accountancy: It takes away a major roadblock to legalizing pot. If you could test to see how recently someone has smoked pot. (And I don't know that it does that, just saying.) You could administer the test on the street.

I would be surprised how accurately this device can detect pot or any other highly fat-soluble molecule in sweat (which is predominantly water). There's a reason experiment after experiment has failed to detect pot in saliva or sweat.

As a forensic scientist, I like the idea of this invention, but I'm dubious at this point. I instantly thought of several cases for false positives, which decrease the device's credibility significantly. If it's testing on fingerprints and the sweat on your fingertips, then it doesn't actually show that you've consumed any of the drug, only that your fingertip has come into contact with the drug for whatever reason.

Reasons that the device detects a drug could be: You've intentionally consumed the drug and it's exiting your body via sweat; you've accidentally consumed the drug (i.e., you were in the same room as someone legally smoking pot, and it got into your system via second hand smoke); you've touched the drug; or you've touched an easily transferable location of which someone else who's touched the drug has touched (this is called secondary transfer, and it's a big concern with forensic considerations of fabrics and debris).

That's all I can think of on the spot. I'm sure other scientists and lawyers will think of many more. But even if the device does work the way it's claimed to work, you'd have to show that it can distinguish between the different types of contact; otherwise it would be useless in court.

Another thought: is there a way to prevent cross-contamination from one sample to the next? If I use this device on two guys, and the first one tests positive because the drug is in his system, will it contaminate the second sample?

I just looked up the specs, and they use gas chromatography to detect the drugs. That works, but it's not as precise as I would like it to be. My thoughts are that this device will potentially work as a screening device (like the current color tests are used for possession), but lab work will still be required if the evidence is to be used in court.

Another question I have about this thing is the usefulness of the fingerprinting aspect. Current technology is horrific with identifying fingerprinting, and requires a human to be able to analyze the computer output to ensure they have the right match. Even then, matching is based on a judgment opinion by a trained fingerprint analyst. These scans typically yield 10-100 potential matches (with a probability that the match is positive), and a person has to go through them to see which is the real match (if the actual match is in the database).

Simply having a handheld computer fingerprinting machine doesn't help at all. It won't be able to analyze it. If it stores the fingerprint, it may not be a good sample (often times, you have to redo a fingerprint scan until the computer gets it right, and even then, a human might look at it and claim it's crap, and another scan will have to be done). All this takes time.

I'm seeing more and more problems with this. As it is right now, I foresee limited uses in regards to forensics. However, as time goes on, this might be a good jumping point for improved technology.

I like it, but I don't see much use for it yet, especially if it is expensive.