DRUG MACHINE IS THE REAL CRIME

A Scanner At Penitentiary Gates is Finding Drugs in the Oddest of Places

At the advice of my doctor, who felt I might have become "a touch paranoid"
when I told him "there are more of them than there are of us," I made an
appointment with a psychiatrist.

Once a week, since last September, I have spent an hour discussing my
relationship with a machine.

The ion scanner, or its alleged state-of-the-art predecessor, the Itemizer
machine, is a byproduct of yet another American-made loser of a war (the
age-old one, on drugs) purportedly able to detect microscopic particles of
illicit substances.

Correctional Service Canada has foisted this machine on our country's
penitentiaries, at a cost of $60,000 a hit.

The problem is, the Itemizer can't always tell the difference between hand
lotion and heroin or LSD.

When the machine first reared its capricious head at William Head
Institution in August 2002, numbers of visitors, all known non-drug users,
began testing false-positive for everything from marijuana to heroin, and
several octogenarian church-goers for crystal meth.

Not everyone who attends is a saint, but even a skeptic would be
hard-pressed to picture Sunday afternoon in the prison's interfaith chapel
as an orgy of methamphetamine abuse.

Needless to say, I took precautions. Before visiting my husband, I bathed,
donned freshly laundered clothes, scoured my hands, my watch and and
wedding band with a vegetable brush.

The Itemizer gave me the thumb's-up every time, until the day I let my
guard down and applied Body Shop Soy Butter Cream to my skin after my bath.

An hour later, at the prison's front gate, the Itemizer's alarm sounded,
Red Alert! My watch had tested positive for cocaine.

When a visitor tests "positive," she is informed that while no one accuses
her of smuggling drugs into the joint, her visit is being denied because
she is deemed to have come into contact with drugs.

Wild amounts of drugs.

Corrections stands behind the American manufacturers, which maintain the
Itemizer has been calibrated so as not to register "casual contact" (for
example, contact with the 60 per cent of paper money which, according to
the Bank of Canada, contains cocaine residue) -- that in order to test
positive I must first have shaken hands with the Medellin cartel.

I seriously doubt whether the Body Shop buffs up its Soy Butter Cream with
cocaine to make it go further, but this was the only explanation I was able
to offer the prison's Visits Review Board, before whom I appeared a week
later. (Another visitor's hand cream had tested positive for heroin, I
learned.)

The board thought bleach might be the best cleaning product to use ("Try
Clorox Wipes," one member suggested) if I was concerned about possible
contamination from prison door knobs, etc.

On my next visit, my bracelet, made from 22-calibre bullet shells (if I'm
guilty of anything it's the delight I take in watching bullets being
scanned for microscopic particles of drugs) which I had cleaned with a
Clorox Wipe, tested positive for LSD.

Several days later, the prison chaplain, who'd heard of my nightmare,
offered his watch for inspection -- it tested negative.

He cleaned it with a Clorox Wipe and asked to have it scanned again. This
time it tested positive -- not for LSD, but for cocaine.

The machine was given a time out, until a snake-oil salesman blew in from
the U.S. to recalibrate it so that it no longer confuses Clorox Wipes with
a controlled substance.

But what about the thousands of other innocent cleaning products, perfumes,
toiletries and prescription drugs that have the same molecular responses as
the active ingredients in narcotics?

How many more visitors to prison must suffer unnecessary humiliation in the
hands of a machine that has proven itself utterly capable of making inhuman
errors?

Corrections claims that family is the single most important rehabilitative
tool in a prisoner's reformation.

One First Nations woman who appeared before the Visits Review Board with a
native elder who was recovering from a hip operation when she had tested
false-positive for ecstasy, told me she will no longer bring her children
to see their father.

She blames the Itemizer for breaking families apart. (A 46-year-old inmate
hanged himself last fall after his 82-year-old mother tested false-positive
for cocaine and was turned away at the front gate. She never saw her son
again.)

The Itemizer machine should be sent packing from our prisons until it can
be programmed to tell the difference between right and wrong.

I would sooner submit to random urinalysis or a full body search if that is
what it takes to ensure my visits are not interfered with.

Any invasive procedure would seem far less inhumane and demeaning than the
situation prison visitors must these days endure.