Vapour-sniffing drug detector tested at the US-Mexico border

The American customs and border protection agency tests technology that sniffs illegal substances in the air, no contact required. The device could filter objects on the border in a few seconds to help fight against drug trafficking like fentanyl, which leads to the opioid crisis in the United States.

Explosive drugs and chemicals are difficult to detect because they release relatively few molecules in the ambient air, which is already filled with other vapors. To solve this problem, Robert Ewing and his colleagues from the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington State have spent the last decade developing an extremely sensitive system called Vaporid. It can precisely identify specific substances from 0.6 to 2.4 meters at levels of 10 parts per quadrillion – comparable to the search for a single room in a stack of 17 million times higher than Mount Everest.

Government scientists have reached by giving more time to substances of interest to come up against other molecules and produce a detectable chemical reaction. Most devices to identify unknown substances give molecules only a few milliseconds to react, explains Ewing. “We made the atmospheric flow tube, which provided 2 or 3 seconds of reaction time and gave three orders of size increase in sensitivity.”

This technology is now incorporated into an 18-kilograms commercial device the size of a microwave. The miniaturized machine, developed by the company in California Bayspec, is less sensitive than the PNNL LAB version, which weighs more than 100 kilograms and is the size of a small refrigerator. But he is still “more precise and more sensitive than a canine,” said William Yang, CEO of Bayspec.

Bayspec and PNNL researchers tested the portable system in a customs and borders protection installation (CBP) in Nogales, Arizona, in October 2024. The team opened bottles of samples containing liquid or powder of seized drugs – including cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and methamphetamine – The open bottles near the device as a whole. In separate tests, the researchers slipped the surface of the pills seized and heated the swabs to generate steam for detection. “The two methods have produced solid and reliable results,” said Krisztian Torma in Bayspec.

The prototype is still being evaluated and requires a more scientific review of the data, says a spokesperson for the CBP.

Alex KROTULSKI at the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education, a non-profit organization in Pennsylvania, says that it remains “skeptical until the device has proven itself through research and rigorous evaluations, because we have seen far too many other devices in recent years which are overlooked and sublocked”.

There are already portable techniques, such as X -rays, to detect hidden drugs, explains Richard Crocombe, independent consultant in Massachusetts. He calls the new tool “another precious technique in the arsenal”, but warns that “no technique meets all needs”. For example, the CBP spokesperson notes that although it can potentially speed up medication tests in field laboratories, the new device would always require an analysis by a chemist formed.

Such screening methods are also likely to raise false positives because “sometimes it seems that drug residues are almost everywhere,” said Joseph Palamar at New York University. Previous research shows that it has contaminated most American papers, for example. “If he reacts as” positive “for someone who has been near people using fentanyl and therefore has tiny traces on their clothes or shoes, then I worry about people who have nothing to do with detained or penalized drug trafficking,” explains Chelsea Shover at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Taking drugs before entering the country is only part of a wider strategy necessary to curb the opioid crisis, explains Shover. However, the resolution of this will also require robust public health agencies, access to health care and generalized processing options, she says, which are currently reduced under the Trump administration. “To save lives, we want treatment – effective treatment based on evidence – to be easier to access than illicit drugs,” explains Shover.