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Vehicles lined up for US immigration and customs processing at the border entry point from Tijuana, Mexico.
Large quantities of the synthetic drug fentanyl flow into the country at ports of entry along the Southwest border, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency. As this drug drives a nationwide overdose epidemic, law enforcement agencies are considering technologies that might help stem the flow.
Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have tested whether a chemical detection technology called ion mobility spectrometry, or IMS, can be used to screen vehicles for fentanyl. Their results, recently published in the journal Analyst, show that IMS can be effective for this purpose and include sensitivity levels, error rates and other metrics that can help authorities weigh the costs and benefits.
IMS is already used to keep explosives off airplanes and narcotics out of prisons. But the performance of IMS varies depending on the substances being targeted and the chemicals present in the environment where the screening takes place. Those chemicals, which scientists refer to as background clutter, can sometimes confuse IMS instruments. This research is the first to test the ability of IMS to distinguish fentanyl from the background clutter that might be expected at a border crossing.
The researchers conducted their tests at a loading dock at a federal facility—an environment that, because it is full of vehicles and cargo, is likely to have background clutter similar to that found at border crossings. To defend against truck bombs, security officers th ..
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