The San Diego police department doesn’t have a drug testing backlog, which plagues many law enforcement agencies across the country. Lisa Merzwski, the department’s supervising criminalist, credits that to something called microcrystal testing.
Only a handful of police departments across the country use the test, which uses a chemical compound to verify potential drug evidence under a microscope. It’s fast, can reduce court backlogs, and costs taxpayers much less money than other forms of drug testing.
“We’ve always used this test,” Merzwski said. “I had two analysts come from New York. After I trained them how to do it, they were like, ‘Why isn’t everyone doing this?”
Merzwski and other supporters of the test say it could help police departments and other agencies reduce drug testing backlogs affordably and efficiently.
But the tests have been slow to catch on nationwide, since they can’t identify all drugs and any evidence that goes to trial has to be re-tested by a more thorough machine.
In San Diego, roughly 70 percent of the drugs analysts see is methamphetamine, making the test ideal for the department.
In the field, a police officer can run a color test to see if a drug sample is, in fact, an illegal drug. Similar to a pregnancy test, a sample will change colors if an illegal substance is present.
Microcrystal testing is a further step. In a lab, a chemist takes a 1 milligram sample of evidence, about the amount at the end of a toothpick, dissolves it in two liquids, mixes it together, and looks under a microscope to see which crystals form.
Meth crystals look like tiny clothespins, cocaine like an “x” with pinecone needles, and heroin like burrs that stick to pants legs after a walk in the woods.
They’re all distinctive and easy to spot, making the test simple to the trained eye.
After traveling to San Diego, Dr. Glenn Langenburg, a supervisor of the drug chemistry section for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, brought the idea back to his state. Last year, the bureau started the testing in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis. The county is one of the biggest providers of drug evidence to the bureau.
“It’s very fast and efficient and certainly less expensive than the traditional technique,” Langenburg said.
The traditional technique is an instrument test, such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, or GC-MS, that analyzes the structures of compounds. It’s expensive and time-consuming, but considered the gold standard of drug testing.
The bureau gets more than 8,000 cases a year, but the staff of 22 scientists and lab personnel can handle only between 5,000 to 6,000 of those.
Having an answer as to which, if any, drugs are present in evidence is key early in investigations. Results from microcrystal drug tests take two to four weeks, while instrument tests can take months. Microcrystal tests allow prosecutors to hold initial hearings earlier, helping eliminate court backlogs.
“We literally cannot keep up,” Langenburg said. “We need reports for first hearings, not at trial.”
Cooperation among the bureau, district attorneys and law enforcement is key, Langenburg said. Making sure prosecutors and, more importantly, the defense accept the results of the test is vital.
“It’s much more important to have that information early on,” Langenburg said. The bureau can run eight microcrystal tests in the time it takes to run one test through GC-MS.
“We might have a solution to our problems,” Langenburg said.
Last year in Hennepin County, 600 court appearances were eliminated by having results of the drug tests sooner. Microcrystal tests have produced no false positives in the county. With that track record, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said three other Minnesota counties are ready to come on board.
“The suspects, they don’t sit in jail waiting to find out if a drug is really a drug,” he said. “It’s good for the attorneys, it’s good for the jail, it’s good for the courts.”
Freeman is also president of the National District Attorneys Association. He plans to advocate that other states use the tests at the association’s meeting in November.
“It’s a win-win-win-win,” he said. “Trust me, the [public defenders] wouldn’t be buying into it if it wasn’t a good thing.”
One of the drawbacks to microcrystal testing, compared to other forms of testing, is that is isn’t always the final step. If a case goes to trial, evidence will have to undergo an instrument test, like GC-MS. Instrument tests can identify many more drugs and are considered universally confirmatory.
Microcrystal tests, which have been around since the late 1800s, fell out of fashion in the 1970s as scientists began to rely on instruments over microscopes, said Eric Person, professor of forensic and analytical chemistry at California State University, Fresno.
One GC-MS machine alone can cost more than $80,000 — the cost of thousands of microcrystal tests. Around the world, the microcrystal tests are more popular because of their lower cost.
Another issue, Person said, is that crystal tests are not widely taught in chemistry classes, so upcoming forensic scientists are not being exposed to the technology.
Testing can vary regionally as well. Drugs that haven’t been shown to produce unique crystals, such as oxycodone or fentanyl, are not suitable for microcrystal testing.
“This is absolutely the right test for some drugs and some regions,” Person said. “They have a place, but they can’t do everything.”
