What comes to mind immediately as an approach for a ‘fentanyl machine’ is that they already exist: we call them sniffer dogs. Because it is almost impossible to store or seal bulk chemicals so that zero molecules leak out—as marijuana smugglers know, even triple or quadruple sealing drugs is not enough to render them truly impermeable and invisible to drug detecting dog noses. (Even if they start out invisible, apparently getting knocked around during transit or the contents slowly permeating out is enough. So at least when I was tracking the DNMs, weed sellers would triple-bag and then require an express priority shipping type—the logic being that the faster it got shipped, the less smelly it would be, and the more unwilling the shipper would be to interfere with it, and if they pulled it out of the shipping flow and got a warrant to open it, that might blow the shipping deadline and at least warn the sender or recipient so they can clean house.) And that is with purely passive smelling.
You could make smelling much more active: use compressed-air hoses to blow through the truck and spew out all sorts of compounds for collection and intensive analysis using every wavelength or sensor type you please. (Is this illegal as a violation of privacy, as it is actively extracting atoms rather than atoms the subject carelessly spews around publicly and so abandons their property rights in? No, because it’s the border. You have no rights at the border.)
So maybe all your tricorder needs is… a little fan. “Bones, inspect this man!” bzzzzzz
DNM sellers are mostly not too bright[1], and the dreaded killer weed is relatively smelly, bulky, and low-value compared to something like fentanyl. If I remember right, they use, or at least used to use, heat-sealed mylar bags, which you’d expect would leak.
If I wanted to ship fentanyl past dogs, I’d research the possibility of sealing it in glass ampoules. A correctly sealed ampoule will hold a hard vacuum for decades. Assuming it was properly cleaned on the outside, I don’t believe a dog would detect it even from sniffing it directly. And I do know some of the very impressive things dogs can detect. Welded metal vessels can also be pretty tight.
A bit off topic, dogs are also unreliable enough that they shouldn’t really be allowed to be used, even if you think mass-searching shipments is OK to begin with. It’s not that dog doesn’t know what’s there; it’s that the communication between the dog and the handler is suspect.
That’s a big assumption! It is difficult to clean truly thoroughly (see eg disappearing polymorph contamination), and DNM sellers have been busted using fingerprints even when they thought they were being careful to avoid that. It is surely possible with enough care, but by the point you’re using vacuum-sealed glass ampoules and cleanrooms to avoid contamination on the outside...
It definitely raises the bar, and it may very well raise it well out of reach of the average DNM seller, but I think you may be imagining the whole process to be harder than it has to be.
I have everything I’d need to seal ampoules lying around downstairs[1]. It’s a few hundred dollars worth of stuff. More than a bag sealer, but not a fortune. You wouldn’t even have to buy blanks; you could make them from plain tubing. You don’t have to seal them under vacuum. There’s not that much skill involved, either; closing a tube is about as simple as flameworking can get. The biggest learning investment would probably be learning how to handle the torch without unfortunate unintended consequences.
You don’t have to avoid contamination; you just have to clean it off. One nice thing about glass is that you can soak it for as long as you like in a bottle of just about any any noxious fentanyl-eating chemical you can identify. You can wash down the outside of the bottle with the same stuff. I doubt you’d have to resort to any exotic chemicals; one or another of bleach, peroxide, lye, or your favorite mineral acid would probably destroy it pretty rapidly.
It would be a really good idea to have a separate pack-and-ship facility, and an accomplice to run it, but you don’t need to resort to a clean room.
FIngerprints (and stray hairs and the like) would actually be much harder to deal with, although of course they won’t alert dogs.
Hmm, but that has trade-off with not showing up as suspect to X-ray. So maybe a mix of approaches makes it quite expensive to smuggle drugs and thus limit supply/raise price/drop consumption
My take on sniffer dogs is that frequently, what they are best at is picking up is unconscious tells from their handler. In so far as they do, they are merely science!-washing the (possibly meritful) biases of the police officier.
Packaging something really air-tight without outside contamination is indeed far from trivial. For example, the swipe tests taken at airports are useful because while it is certainly possible to pack a briefcase full of explosives without any residue on the outside is certainly possible, most of the people who could manage to build a bomb would not manage to do that.
Of course, there are also no profit margins in blowing up airplanes, so stopping the amateurs is already 95% of the job.
There are significant profit margins in drug trafficking. After you intercept a few shipments and arrest a few mules, the cleverer drug lords will wisen up.
A multi-method approach might work for a while, glass vials are probably more visible on that CT scan than some organic substance.
The idea that the sniffer dog picks up on what the handler is thinking and plays it out for them is very interesting, and maybe does indeed happen sometimes.
But I think you are probably overcorrecting somewhat. Sniffer dogs do actually smell things. In much more low-stakes situations I have seen one in New Zealand successfully identify several people getting off a flight who had forgotten about food in their backpacks (they have strict laws against food going in in case you bring a new blight or pest or whatever). So my read is that sniffer dogs are at least good enough at actual sniffing to demand some kind of response from would be smugglers (eg. extra plastic wrapping).
“Food” in general is about the easiest and most natural thing for a dog to identify. Distinguishing illegal drugs from all the other random stuff a person might be carrying (soap, perfume, medicine, etc.) at least requires a lot better training than finding food.
Very possible. I am not fully convinced. The dog had to identify the people who had food in there bags, and tell them apart from all the people who used to have food in those same bags, or were eating on the flight and have food on there breath or hands. A dog trying to identify (for example) canabis would probably have an easier time.
My stance is not “I know 100% that sniffer dogs are a silver bullet”, but the weaker position “The majority of the value of a sniffer dog comes from it actually smelling things, rather than giving the officer controlling it a plausible way of profiling based on other (possibly protected) characteristics.”
Weed smells orders of magnitude more than many powders and I imagine releases way more particles into the air but assuming this is doable for well packed fentanyl is there a limit? Can you expose dogs to enough say carfentanil safely initially to start training them? lofentanil?
And if it’s detectable by dogs surely it can’t be that far from our capabilities to create a sensor that detects particles in the air at the same fidelity as a dog’s nose by copying the general functionality of olfactory receptors and neurons if cost isn’t a big issue.
What comes to mind immediately as an approach for a ‘fentanyl machine’ is that they already exist: we call them sniffer dogs. Because it is almost impossible to store or seal bulk chemicals so that zero molecules leak out—as marijuana smugglers know, even triple or quadruple sealing drugs is not enough to render them truly impermeable and invisible to drug detecting dog noses. (Even if they start out invisible, apparently getting knocked around during transit or the contents slowly permeating out is enough. So at least when I was tracking the DNMs, weed sellers would triple-bag and then require an express priority shipping type—the logic being that the faster it got shipped, the less smelly it would be, and the more unwilling the shipper would be to interfere with it, and if they pulled it out of the shipping flow and got a warrant to open it, that might blow the shipping deadline and at least warn the sender or recipient so they can clean house.) And that is with purely passive smelling.
You could make smelling much more active: use compressed-air hoses to blow through the truck and spew out all sorts of compounds for collection and intensive analysis using every wavelength or sensor type you please. (Is this illegal as a violation of privacy, as it is actively extracting atoms rather than atoms the subject carelessly spews around publicly and so abandons their property rights in? No, because it’s the border. You have no rights at the border.)
So maybe all your tricorder needs is… a little fan. “Bones, inspect this man!” bzzzzzz
DNM sellers are mostly not too bright[1], and the dreaded killer weed is relatively smelly, bulky, and low-value compared to something like fentanyl. If I remember right, they use, or at least used to use, heat-sealed mylar bags, which you’d expect would leak.
If I wanted to ship fentanyl past dogs, I’d research the possibility of sealing it in glass ampoules. A correctly sealed ampoule will hold a hard vacuum for decades. Assuming it was properly cleaned on the outside, I don’t believe a dog would detect it even from sniffing it directly. And I do know some of the very impressive things dogs can detect. Welded metal vessels can also be pretty tight.
A bit off topic, dogs are also unreliable enough that they shouldn’t really be allowed to be used, even if you think mass-searching shipments is OK to begin with. It’s not that dog doesn’t know what’s there; it’s that the communication between the dog and the handler is suspect.
Smarter than buyers, but still not smart.
That’s a big assumption! It is difficult to clean truly thoroughly (see eg disappearing polymorph contamination), and DNM sellers have been busted using fingerprints even when they thought they were being careful to avoid that. It is surely possible with enough care, but by the point you’re using vacuum-sealed glass ampoules and cleanrooms to avoid contamination on the outside...
It definitely raises the bar, and it may very well raise it well out of reach of the average DNM seller, but I think you may be imagining the whole process to be harder than it has to be.
I have everything I’d need to seal ampoules lying around downstairs[1]. It’s a few hundred dollars worth of stuff. More than a bag sealer, but not a fortune. You wouldn’t even have to buy blanks; you could make them from plain tubing. You don’t have to seal them under vacuum. There’s not that much skill involved, either; closing a tube is about as simple as flameworking can get. The biggest learning investment would probably be learning how to handle the torch without unfortunate unintended consequences.
You don’t have to avoid contamination; you just have to clean it off. One nice thing about glass is that you can soak it for as long as you like in a bottle of just about any any noxious fentanyl-eating chemical you can identify. You can wash down the outside of the bottle with the same stuff. I doubt you’d have to resort to any exotic chemicals; one or another of bleach, peroxide, lye, or your favorite mineral acid would probably destroy it pretty rapidly.
It would be a really good idea to have a separate pack-and-ship facility, and an accomplice to run it, but you don’t need to resort to a clean room.
FIngerprints (and stray hairs and the like) would actually be much harder to deal with, although of course they won’t alert dogs.
Doesn’t everybody have basic glassblowing and welding equipment? Kids these days.
Hmm, but that has trade-off with not showing up as suspect to X-ray. So maybe a mix of approaches makes it quite expensive to smuggle drugs and thus limit supply/raise price/drop consumption
My take on sniffer dogs is that frequently, what they are best at is picking up is unconscious tells from their handler. In so far as they do, they are merely science!-washing the (possibly meritful) biases of the police officier.
Packaging something really air-tight without outside contamination is indeed far from trivial. For example, the swipe tests taken at airports are useful because while it is certainly possible to pack a briefcase full of explosives without any residue on the outside is certainly possible, most of the people who could manage to build a bomb would not manage to do that.
Of course, there are also no profit margins in blowing up airplanes, so stopping the amateurs is already 95% of the job.
There are significant profit margins in drug trafficking. After you intercept a few shipments and arrest a few mules, the cleverer drug lords will wisen up.
A multi-method approach might work for a while, glass vials are probably more visible on that CT scan than some organic substance.
The idea that the sniffer dog picks up on what the handler is thinking and plays it out for them is very interesting, and maybe does indeed happen sometimes.
But I think you are probably overcorrecting somewhat. Sniffer dogs do actually smell things. In much more low-stakes situations I have seen one in New Zealand successfully identify several people getting off a flight who had forgotten about food in their backpacks (they have strict laws against food going in in case you bring a new blight or pest or whatever). So my read is that sniffer dogs are at least good enough at actual sniffing to demand some kind of response from would be smugglers (eg. extra plastic wrapping).
“Food” in general is about the easiest and most natural thing for a dog to identify. Distinguishing illegal drugs from all the other random stuff a person might be carrying (soap, perfume, medicine, etc.) at least requires a lot better training than finding food.
Very possible. I am not fully convinced. The dog had to identify the people who had food in there bags, and tell them apart from all the people who used to have food in those same bags, or were eating on the flight and have food on there breath or hands. A dog trying to identify (for example) canabis would probably have an easier time.
My stance is not “I know 100% that sniffer dogs are a silver bullet”, but the weaker position “The majority of the value of a sniffer dog comes from it actually smelling things, rather than giving the officer controlling it a plausible way of profiling based on other (possibly protected) characteristics.”
Weed smells orders of magnitude more than many powders and I imagine releases way more particles into the air but assuming this is doable for well packed fentanyl is there a limit? Can you expose dogs to enough say carfentanil safely initially to start training them? lofentanil?
And if it’s detectable by dogs surely it can’t be that far from our capabilities to create a sensor that detects particles in the air at the same fidelity as a dog’s nose by copying the general functionality of olfactory receptors and neurons if cost isn’t a big issue.