Skip to main content

This blows: Swedish researchers develop breathalyzer that detects pot and cocaine

sens_abues headerThanks to technology, the fuzz have a wealth of different ways to catch you driving under the influence. But simply catching you driving like a buffoon isn’t the problem. Anybody with eyes can tell that that the guy doing 95 and peeing out his sunroof probably had one too many daiquiris at karaoke night. The problem is proving that you’re actually under the influence.

Booze is one thing. Cops have all kinds of neat little tricks and gizmos they can use to determine if you’re drunk. The Horizontal Gaze Nygstamus test, the Walk-and-Turn test, the One Leg Stand test (not to be confused with the One Night Stand test, which can also lead to handcuffs, awkward positions, and waking up in a strange place next to somebody you don’t recognize), and the infamous breathalyzer test – they’re all great for revealing just how plastered you are. They’re just not so good at telling when you’ve just, say, taken a few too many bong rips, or perhaps gakked up a couple lines of grade-A Colombian blow.

But that’s all about to change. Thanks to some clever research from Swedish scientists, Johnny Law will soon be able to tell when you’ve been smoking Mary Jane. Just this past week, researchers at the Stockholm’s Karolinska Insititute announced that they successfully detected a wide range of drugs using simple breath analysis tests. The researchers recruited 47 subjects from Stockholm Drug Emergency Clinic and collected blood and urine samples from each of them to use as a baseline for the experiment. They then had the subjects blow into a device called SensAbues to collect the contents of their lungs, which were then parsed using chromatography and mass-spectrometry techniques.

sens_abues modell1In all of the tests, the researchers were able to accurately detect more than nine substances, including amphetamine, methamphetamine, morphine, heroin, THC, Diazepam, Oxazepam, cocaine, and benzoylecgonine. And that’s just counting the ones that were accurate enough to be touted commercially. In addition to those nine substances, researchers using SensAbues could also detect buprenorphine, Codiene, MDMA (ecstasy), Methadone, Nicotine, Continine, Zolpiden, and MDPV (bath salts), albeit with much less accuracy.

They have yet to gain widespread use by law enforcement agencies, but given the fact that SensAbues systems are already commercially available, we wouldn’t be surprised to see them make their way into the US within the next few years. You can check out the full study in the Journal of Breath Research here, but you’ll need an account to get full access.

Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more