How physicists are helping fight drug trafficking

More than 18 tonnes of heroin and 25 tonnes of cocaine ^{CITATION Nat l 2057 [1]}, are imported into the UK every year, which has a devastating effect on the social and economic wellbeing of the country. For years, the police and border forces of the UK have tried to, with limited success, slow the flow of illegal substances. However, in order to confiscate the substances and apprehend the smugglers, the drugs first have to be found.

The most common detection method used, especially as seen on TV, is sniffer dogs. These animals are specially trained to detect drugs in luggage and on people. However, they have limited success. In fact, as an experiment, the lecturer that delivered this lecture, David Wilkinson, ran an experiment. Under crown immunity, he went through Heathrow airport carrying an assortment of illicit substances, from crack cocaine to ecstasy, and was inspected by sniffer dogs 5 times. All of them failed.

In response to this failure rate, police now use specially trained bees, farmed in Harrogate, that have olfactory senses 100 times stronger than that of a human, compared to a dog s which is only 40 times stronger CITATION Tys12 l 2057 ^[2]. However, drug testing using animals sparks a moral debate as well as the issue of speed. Is there a faster way to do this testing? Cue, physicists.

Physicists, including David Wilkinson, have developed a way to use low -angle X-Ray scattering to quickly scan luggage and identify, to a fairly high accuracy, those containers which are likely to contain illegal substances. Indeed, experiments have shown that this method can exactly identify not only bags that may contain drugs, but bags that do contain them, and even what kind of drug it is. Of course, this higher accuracy comes at the cost of speed, but it gives police another tool in their war on drug trafficking.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1]

National Crime Agency, "Drugs," [Online]. Available: http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/crime-threats/drugs.

[2]

P. Tyson, "Dogs` Dazzling Sense of Smell," 4 October 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-sense-of-smell.html.