John R Bartels Jnr
United States Drug Enforcement Administration
United States Department of Justice WASHINGTON DC 20537
HOME OFFICE
Romney House, Marsham Street London SWIP 3DY
Direct line 01-212 6702
19 November 1974
Dear John
At the US/UK/Hong Kong drug co-operation meeting in Washington in July some mention was made of the scientific work which your people have been doing on the identification of the origin of different types of heroin and I refer to the work of a Group which I share here on the application of scientific aids to the detection of drug offences. George Belk was good enough to give me a copy of the report on "Heroin Signatures" which you had produced and after my return to the United Kingdom the Group to which I have referred completed a report on its first year's work and I sent a copy of it to George Belk for interest. I am writing to you about some developments in the equipment field which have come out of that report and which we feel have some potential and could well be of interest to you.
Paragraph 23 of the report, which for the sake of simplicity I shall quote at length, referred to a device for the detection of cannabis as follows.
"During the course of the Working Group's discussions as a result of a suggestion
that a device might be developed for the detection of cannabis pollen the Central Research Establishment noted that the hairs on the cannabis plant are of a very distinctive kind and an experiment was carried out which showed that it was possible to develop a technique for the detection of these hairs and their ready identification when cannabis was being carried in baggage or freight. A prototype piece of equipment has been developed and appears to have some potential."
Some further work has been done on this by the Central Research Establishment at Aldermaston, of which Dr Curry is the Head (he is well-known to your scientific colleagues), and they recently gave a demonstration of its potential to a group of scientists and law enforcement officers (both from the police and customs side) which convinced us that it was worth further detailed examination.
The
Basically the principle being applied is a simple one. It rests upon the fact that where there is herbal cannabis and in some cases cannabis resin concealed the distinctive cannabis hairs will be available to be identified. A device can be developed which will draw in a sample of air in which the hairs are suspended. hairs can then be isolated and their presence detected microscopically. We believe there is at least a possibility of developing a simple and cheap piece of equipment for doing this operationally and are impressed enough by the operation of the principle in practice to think it worth further study. As you will see it is based upon the detection of particulate matters and it has occurred to Dr Curry and his people that the same technique could be applied to the detection of other drugs, for example, heroin or morphine. If air is sampled from an enclosure containing heroin or morphine and passed through a tube containing marquis reagent fine particles of the drug may cause a colour change to be produced. This has been demonstrated experimentally with some success when the air in the enclosure was agitated before sampling.
We are now proceeding to the next stage, of attempting to develop a prototype piece of operational equipment which could be used for the detection of cannabis, but we do not wish to ignore the potential of particulate sampling for the detection of other drugs
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