Mandatory meth detectors unreliable

On Stellar Lane on North Whidbey, a meth-related neighborhood nightmare is almost over. The saga began last summer when Wells Fargo foreclosed on a woman's home. She, her ailing mother and her boyfriend moved to an adjacent wooded lot, where they lived in a tiny camping trailer.

After a few weeks, the family moved into a trailer home across the street. Earlier this year, they were evicted from the home.

Piper [county health department] said she caught wind of the situation last year and required Wells Fargo to test the home for meth. The tests came back "hot," she said, so the bank was forced to do a costly clean up. Workers crushed all the structures on site and carted them away. Rivera [realtor working for bank] said some of the dirt even had to be removed.

"It was thousands of dollars in just testing," he said. He admits to being frustrated with the continued testing, but he said the bank will do what it takes to make the Health Department happy.

Was that necessary? Did their health improve one iota after being kicked out of their very last home? Now they have to live in the frickin' woods again.

And it gets worse; apparently these testing units the health department is mandating the use of are fairly unreliable, not surprising considering a hand-held methamphetamine scanner is just a really, really early tricorder. Imagine the number of contracts with branches of government like this one such a device may have landed CDEX (OTC:CEXI).

Health officials tested the dealership after the manager, Nolan Brown, was arrested and charged with possession of meth.

Piper said she hoped to save the owner, Mark Brown, money in the expensive testing by bringing in CDEX Inc., an Arizona company that makes a meth-testing scanner device. But Piper said the scanner apparently didn't work properly. It showed meth was present in 14 of the cars on the site. To check the results, the health department also swabbed the cars and sent the samples to a lab for testing. The results showed that only five of the samples were positive.

"Now we don't know if the negatives were really negatives," Piper said, explaining that dozens of cars will have to be tested the expensive way. "The scanner would have saved the owner a lot of money."

Last month, Oak Harbor resident Mark Brown, who's not related to the sheriff, explained that he started the car business to help his troubled son. Nolan was doing a great job until meth got the best of him, Brown said.

Now the cost of cleaning and testing may spell the end of the lot.

I don't know how much meth must be present to pass one test and not the other, but is it worth destroying all of those homes, cars, and property over?

It sounds to me like this county health department is forcing Banks to foreclose and pay to destroy houses which people may or may not have even been using meth inside of. Bear in mind these houses are not all genuine meth labs; the state of Colorado for example considers any place where methamphetamine or the equipment used to make it have been possessed or stored to be a "meth lab," even in the words of the law's very author. And the new, fancy and expensive tests used to ratify these claims? Unreliable.

This mandatory meth-scanning pretty much just attacks the American financial system, it does nothing to stop the use of meth yet it does a heck of a lot to destroy many otherwise sound investments.

Piper said the owners of the single-wide trailer decided not to do the expensive testing, but the clean-up is being run as if it is a contaminated site. The home will be demolished.

So force this private company's unreliable yet less-expensive (still a fortune) meth-test on as many Americans as possible, who can't afford the more expensive swab tests to fight the false positives. Destroy homes, lives, and the economy in areas that are severely affected by these problems.