DRUGS ARE BAD FOR YOU

The pills? Pain relief. The arrest? That hurt.

By Anthony Cormier
Published Friday, May 2, 2008 at 4:30 a.m.

SARASOTA — When the police stopped him one night in Sarasota, Villis Sanders told officers that the small blue pills in his car were Aleve, an over-the-counter medicine for his aching wisdom teeth.

A patrolman used a drug kit to verify what the pills were.

The test said the tablets were amphetamines, Sanders was jailed and his car was impounded.

But it turns out that the test was wrong. Prosecutors took the pills to a laboratory before Sanders' trial and found out that they were Aleve, after all.

The miscue raises questions about the reliability of police drug kits and how the results of a roadside test can land an innocent person in jail.

Agencies throughout the country use similar kits to identify drugs, and the tests are often the only way for an officer to figure out whether someone is carrying a bag of headache powder or a bag of cocaine.

Experts say that "false positives" are rare, but when the police department tested additional pills -- including an Aleve tablet provided by the Herald-Tribune -- the results were the same: Aleve shows up as amphetamines.

No one knows why the test keeps getting it wrong.

The manufacturer said that officers might not have been properly trained, or that Aleve might contain a compound similar to one found in amphetamines.

Officials from Bayer Health Care, which makes Aleve, did not immediately respond to questions.

And Sarasota police officials questioned both the kits and the compounds in Aleve -- but say that they did everything they could to figure out what Sanders was carrying that night.

Sanders was pulled over in late March for a broken tag light.

His license had been suspended because of unpaid traffic tickets, and he spent 22 hours in jail.

About a month after the arrest, prosecutors dropped the drug charge and the city paid back more than $1,000 in towing and impound fees.

"I feel bad for the guy, I really do," said Capt. Bill Spitler, the head of the department's patrol division. "No one should be arrested for something they did not do."

Sanders says no one called to tell him the charges were dropped, nor did they explain what happened or apologize.

He found out when he went to the courthouse and a clerk told him the drug charge had been dropped.

His arrest is not the first time that a law enforcement agency jailed a man after a false positive test result.

In Manatee County last year, a man was arrested on drug charges after deputies found white powder in his car.

The powder, they said, was cocaine. He said it was caffeine powder. When the substance went to a lab, the suspect turned out to be right.

"It is rare, but it happens," said Mike Healy, a forensic chemist with the Manatee County Sheriff's Office. "You don't see it a lot, but that is why these are presumptive tests. It's enough to have someone arrested, but it is not enough to take to court."

The manufacturer of the kits, Morris-Kopec Forensics, no longer makes the tests, said company president Wayne Morris. His business partner left the state and Morris said he decided to stop making the product.

But the issue, he said, is not with his product, but rather with the officers or the pills.

Morris said that there might be an ingredient in Aleve that is similar to the compounds in amphetamines, or that the officers were not trained to recognize the difference between a street drug and one available at the corner pharmacy.

"That's why they call them 'presumptive tests,'" he said. "It just means that this is an indication that what they found could be a controlled substance."

In this case, both of the tablets found in Sanders' car were blue and oblong, and each was stamped with the word "Aleve."