ARDEN FUMING OVER PRISON DRUG TESTING

CALGARY -- Jann Arden is calling for a ban on prison drug-testing machines
for visitors after her father and mother tested positive for cocaine and
heroin, respectively.

The Canadian singing star told The Sun the incident occurred when members
of her family went to visit her brother, Duray Richards, who is doing a
life sentence in Bowden Institution for the Dec. 4, 1992 first-degree
murder of a Creston, B.C., woman.

"Dad and I and mom were all swabbed," she said, speaking of a machine at
the prison that takes swabs or swipes of visitors' personal articles and
scans them for minute drug particles.

The swipe was done and it came back with the results her mom's article
tested positive for cocaine and her dad's for heroin.

"I tested positive for marijuana," Arden said.

The Ardens vehemently deny using any of those illegal drugs.

"I've never been convicted of a crime, but 60 seconds after they swab your
stuff (the guards) look at you in a very accusatory way," Arden said.
Visits can be refused based on the drug-machine tests, said Rita Wehrly,
the assistant warden of Bowden, located 194 km south of Edmonton.

"The Ion scanner is in use in all federal institutions and the combined
overall purpose ultimately is to reduce the supply of drugs coming into the
institution," she said.

What typically happens is visitors arriving at the institution are asked to
provide a personal article of clothing like a jacket, car keys or a
driver's licence and that item is swiped by a drug-collector pad and the
tissue is processed through a scanner.

The scanner assesses the sample for the presence of drugs like cocaine,
heroin, barbiturates and marijuana.

But civil libertarians believe the tests are unfair, mostly because the
devices are so sensitive that a person could test positive after
inadvertently brushing against something a drug user previously touched,
such as money, faucets or gas pumps.

The prison has no intention of retiring the machines. About 70 per cent of
all federal inmates have a drug-dependency problem, Wehrly said.

"We're doing what we can to keep drugs out of the institution."