TruNarc Is Laser Testing for Drug Content at the Speed of Light

On some level, it’s common knowledge that there must be ads and pitches for absolutely everything. That didn’t mean I was totally ready to see handguns advertised like iPod Minis—so many colors!—in American Rifleman, which I received by mistake for a few months. That knowledge also doesn’t make this ad for a laser-driven narcotics tester any less bizarre.

TruNarc—and let’s be honest, that name is phonetically hilarious—has been in the news lately because the police in Quincy, Massachusetts, are using the hand-held device to test for molly, which has implicated in a dozen overdoses at the Marina Bay Ocean Club. The tests on methylone seized by police in arrests at the club indicated that there were no other substances present. In this way, TruNarc disproved the suspicions that an unnamed “suspected club drug user” voiced to the Boston Herald, claiming that molly was being mixed with other drugs.

Using Raman spectrometry, TruNarc can identify chemical composition through the evidence bag, so without risk of contamination. It fires light into the substance in question and scans its onboard library to identify what’s in the bag—whether it be narcotics or common cutting agents. Police officers interviewed by WHDH noted that the crime labs are often backed up—an Alabama police department using TruNarc to test for synthetic marijuana said the department of forensic science would take 18 months to return lab results—and the TruNarc works in under three minutes. Depending on a department’s procedures, a test result from the TruNarc might still necessitate another test, either from a different type of spectrometer, as outlined in the Scientific Working Group’s drug analysis recommendations.

It’s clear that the product fills a pretty understandable need; it’s just that its pitch video strikes me as much funnier than its makers must have intended. Of course their job isn’t to impress me; let’s call the information in the video the molly, cut with my mild amusement.

I think it’s the way it starts with, “Got a drug problem? We ALL do,” that does it. Or it might be how the police officer’s mild annoyance at doing drug tests the old fashioned way reminds me of people in infomercials who are incapable of very basic tasks. Maybe cops are just inherently funny, as the Tumblr “Cop Selfies” surmises. Or maybe this video is a subtle reminder that law enforcement is subject to marketing just like anything else, and they’re being sold on paramilitary equipment in videos just like these somewhere that eventually be brought out because when “you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail,” so I laugh to cover my fear that life is resembling the film Brazil more everyday and there’s no controlling it.

Christ, I hope it’s not that.