A breath test for opioids

Michael Burstein

Mr. Ippolito

Forensics - D Odd / Current Event #6

October 27, 2019

University of California - Davis. "A breath test for opioids." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 October 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191004105645.htm>.

This journal article titled, “A breath test for opioids” published by a research team out of the University of California - Davis is a relatively new piece that was generated as a result of this brand new discovery. The hope is that this new breath test could be used in a variety of settings. The main area of focus for the research team is in caring for chronic pain patients. The hope is that this can help doctors monitor their patients taking medications in order to make sure they are taking the drugs correctly, the drugs are being metabolized properly, and that they are not taking any additional medications. The article goes on to discuss the various other ways they hope this test can be used in the future. At this point, it is still too early to be trying to apply this new technique to a variety of fields, so the researchers have picked one to focus on for now. 

This new technique for detecting opioids has the potential to be very important in the field of forensic science. This is because this new approach to detecting opioids relies on a person’s breath, and works similar to a standard breathalyzer that is currently used by police departments to detect alcohol. The goal is that in the future police officers will be able to “breathalyze” people suspected of having prescription drugs in their system. This could be influential in forensic science because drugs play a major role in helping solve crimes and analyze crime scenes. If there was a faster way to detect the presence of drugs it could change the way crime scenes are processed. 

Overall, I thought this article was well-written. The authors do a really good job of highlighting their discovery, discussing the various ways this new technique can be applied, and they do acknowledge the shortcomings. As the article makes note of, I too agree that to fully validate this breath test more data needs to be collected and it needs to be collected from a wider variety of patients. The one thing I would change is that I would write more about some of the other uses this breath test has rather than applying most of the focus of the article towards the benefits of using it in the medical field. I would also write more about what some flaws with this breath test may be, including possibly how accurate or inaccurate it is.