At 11:01 PM 3/17/2003 +0000, you wrote:On 17 Mar 2003 at 13:33, Jon Gabriel wrote:
> Ananova: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_761225.html?menu=news.qu > irkies > > Police red-faced after hailing major cocaine coup > > Police in Italy have released eight men after the haul of "cocaine" > they were seized with turned out to be athletes foot powder.
Read that in the Metro this morning. *laughs*
Understandable, but NEXT time I think they'll wait for the lab results :P
Andy
Let's pretend I don't know what I'm talking about <VBG>.* Ever notice on cop shows when they grab criminals with cocaine, (I'm assuming this is what it looks like) they put a tiny bit on the tip of their tongue? It makes that little bit of tongue go dead, quite quickly. Now in this age with Anthrax and so on this may not be the best thing to do. Maybe no cops ever did this, it was just a fantasy made up by some writer using his first hand knowledge.
I have it on reasonably good authority (I know lots of police officers, besides, I read it somewhere ;-) ) that no cop would ever taste a suspicious substance to see if it was drugs. For one thing, many street drugs contain various impurities, some of them not necessarily healthy, for another, even if it were drugs with no toxic additives, the purity of street drugs varies so widely that a small amount could constitute a serious "hit." In practice, there are little test kits they can carry in their cars or sometimes even in their pockets. One presumes these particular officers did not have such a test kit when they made the arrest, and had to wait for lab results. Or it could have been that they had one, but some ingredient in the foot powder gave a false positive reading on that simple test (anyone know if that is possible?).
OTOH, assuming it _had_ been cocaine, should they have had to wait until the lab report came back the next morning before arresting the suspects, or at least being able to detain them on suspicion? Had they really been drug dealers, they would have been long gone by the time the lab report came back unless they were in custody . . .
-- Ronn! :)
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