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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Toothpick Test Turns Cellphones Into A Drug Dealer's Worst Enemy
James Randerson New Scientist
Saturday 20 Jul 2002 IT'S BECOME an essential tool for drug dealers, but the mobile phone could also prove their downfall. And wiping incriminating calls from the phone's memory won't help. It's the gunk between the buttons the police are after. The many tiny crevices on a cellphone can harbour drug particles if the user has been in regular contact with them. But until recently, no one knew if a cellphone could be innocently contaminated with drugs. Since cocaine traces are present on 99 per cent of British bank notes, it's possible that phones are easily tainted. Now forensic scientists have shown that the drug contamination on a dealer's or a heavy user's cellphone is much higher than you would find by chance. Neil Ronan and his colleagues at Mass Spec Analytical in Bristol checked out 150 handsets to see how often they harboured traces of drugs. Most were old phones ditched by people upgrading to newer models, but some came from police drug squad officers. The researchers used a toothpick to delve into seven parts of each phone, including down the side of the most frequently used buttons. Only 5 per cent of handsets were positive for cocaine, heroin and ecstasy, while none showed traces of cannabis. The phones that were innocently contaminated tended to have deposits at only one point, but the phones of people who had recently handled drugs typically had traces all over them. This will help forensic teams differentiate between likely dealers and innocent people, Ronan says. Compared with other personal items celiphones have lots of nooks and crannies, so if the same trace signatures are found all over it, it's pretty hard to explain away as chance. "Before, I could just say that drugs were there," says Ronan. Now he can say what that means. But such trace evidence on its own will not support a conviction. It simply helps build up a picture of the defendant, he said at a Royal Society of Chemistry forensics conference in Lincoln last week.
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