One California company claims it has made a major
breakthrough in creating what some thought of as a unicorn: a marijuana
breathalyzer, reported NPR.
"We are trying to make the establishment of impairment
around marijuana rational and to balance fairness and safety," says Hound Labs CEO Mike Lynn in his downtown
Oakland, Calif., office.
In a freshly pressed dress shirt and short hair, it's clear
Lynn is no stoner inventor with a pipe dream. The former venture capitalist is
a practicing emergency room trauma physician in Oakland and an active SWAT team
deputy reserve sheriff for Alameda County, Calif. He knows first hand the
devastating effects drugged and drunk driving can have.
He picks up a small plastic box. "This is a disposable
cartridge. And there's a whole bunch of science in this cartridge," Lynn
says as he slips it into the device about the size of a large mobile phone. A
small plastic tube sticks out of one end.
He starts to blow into the tube for the required thirty
seconds.
Indicator bars start to show whether the machine detects any
THC in his breath. THC is the psychoactive component in pot that gets you high.
Hound Labs says its device can accurately detect whether a
person has smoked pot in the last two hours, a window many consider the peak
impairment time frame. "When you find THC in breath, you can be pretty
darn sure that somebody smoked pot in the last couple of hours," Lynn
says. "And we don't want to have people driving during that time period
or, frankly, at a work site in a construction zone."
Lynn then slides the cartridge into a small base station the
size of a laptop, used to protect against cold or hot extremes. The
breathalyzer needs a consistent temperature to have consistent results.
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