The DrugScanner, made by Swedish manufacturers Biosensor, is liquid based and consequently does not suffer from overload or cross-contamination problems that users frequently experience with traditional systems. Consequently the false alarm rate is low.
The high sensitivity of the Swedish kit means that it can be used to detect personal drug abuse as well as trace or bulk quantities of drugs by analysing samples taken from a simple skin swab or a small saliva ‘lick’, overcoming the problem of the person being tested having to produce large quantities of saliva required for ‘dip stick’ analysis – not easy if a suspect is either stoned or nervous or both and has a very dry mouth.
It also overcomes the issues surrounding the use of urine samples for drug detection: collecting urine can be messy, the ease of replacing urine with a clean sample means urine collection is ideally witnessed, a procedure which is unpleasant and invasive for everyone.
