DEPUTIES' PORTABLE DRUG TEST KIT TELLS ALL

Deputy First Class John Glowacki's trunk is his office. It's where he
keeps the basic tools he needs when he's patrolling the streets of
Bonita Springs for the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

Beside a plastic filing crate, he stores his shotgun, crime scene
tape, road flares, lollipops and toys for children, evidence bags and
other essentials.

Glowacki's office also includes a drug testing kit, used by street
deputies in Lee County for about 15 years.

The kit (pictured at left) includes tests for marijuana, cocaine,
heroin, LSD and more. It's a popular tool among area law enforcement
agencies. In Collier County, they're used by the Naples Police and the
Collier Sheriff's Office.

"Anyone who feels they may come into contact with a situation
involving drugs has one in the car," said Collier Sheriff's Spokesman
Damian Housman. "In particular, the youth crimes officers and the
canine officers all have them and we keep them in all the
substations."

Glowacki said they come in useful just about anytime an officer
encounters a controlled substance.

"I could test just about everything in my little kit here," he
said.

Usually, Glowacki and other deputies find themselves testing crack
cocaine, powdered cocaine or marijuana.

The tests are put into use under a variety of circumstances, Glowacki
said.

If an officer suspects a person is carrying drugs, they might ask that
person to consent to a search or suspects are searched if they are
arrested on another charge.

"Once they're arrested, we have to search them for their protection
and for our protection," Glowacki said.

A drug testing kit comes into play if an officer finds something that
looks like an illegal drug during a search.

The tests are nothing like in the movies or on television where an
officer sniffs a bag or dips his finger in a bag to take a sample test.

In real life, officers wear gloves to protect their skin from coming
in contact with a drug. They use a loading device, which is a wooden
tab with a small indention, to put the substance in a small plastic
bag filled with between one and three glass vials.

The vials, which contain a mixture of concentrated sulphuric acid and
selenious acid, are broken once the substance is inside the plastic
bag. Then, depending on the type of drug, the acid changes color. The
presence of heroin turns the acid purple. Cocaine turns the acid pink
and blue.

"That gives me enough evidence to arrest a person for possession of
that narcotic substance," Glowacki said.

The field drug testing kit is the probable cause the deputies need to
charge a person. But proof beyond a reasonable doubt, needed for a
conviction in court, comes from laboratory chemists who also test the
substance.

Glowacki said the chemists' results have always matched the field
testing kits' results that he's conducted.

The field tests are so accurate, they're similar to tests drug dealers
and buyers use to make sure they're getting what they paid for,
Glowacki said.

Sgt. Linda King said the kits save deputies the time of traveling to a
substation or to the main sheriff's office on Six Mile Cypress Parkway
to test substances.

A kit, which contains about 10 individual testing packets, costs about
$13.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry