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SALT LAKE CITY — Though they are far from the front lines, they play a vital role in policing drug crime in the state of Utah.
They are forensic chemists, and their jobs have only grown more difficult in recent years as they have scrambled to identify a ballooning number of synthetic drugs.
"The synthetics really do pose a problem for us in that they take time – they take a lot more time," said Utah Bureau of Forensic Services director Jay Henry. "That's really the challenge for them is to sort of drop their everyday production and spend some time on these unique cases, but they have to be identified.
Utah now outlaws 71 synthetic substances, most of which have been identified within the past 4 years, and some of which only differ by an atom or two.
"Once these become controlled substances, it's very easy for chemists in a foreign country to simply create another molecule," explained senior forensic scientist manager Jennifer McNair. "So then this now is not a controlled substance and it can be sold until lawmakers come back together and make this a controlled substance, and then the chemists go on and on creating different substances."
Henry said, however, that state scientists have been able to effectively keep up with the pace of the creation of new synthetic drugs.
"We've slowed down the initial wave that we had several years ago where it was a giant and enormous problem because we had proliferation of these drugs," he explained. "Now that we've kind of got a mechanism in place, it works pretty effectively."
Good thing, said Henry, since the state crime lab assists in roughly 3,000 drug cases of all kinds per year.
Henry said efforts to train local police to identify some of the more common drugs, such as in the Field Investigation Drug Officer Program (FIDO) and Marijuana Leaf Technician Program, have helped the state crime lab to work efficiently.
Another 3,000 to 4,000 drug cases are handled annually at the local level, Henry said.
"The agencies' responsibility is to pre-screen whatever they can by themselves, and then those drug-question cases where they might have a question, they're able to send to us for confirmation and make sure," Henry explained. "If there's a case that's going to court, then certainly those cases will be sent to us for final confirmation."
McNair said the lab currently returns results on the median drug case in 5 to 7 days, and can provide same-day results on pressing cases.
Henry said in other states the wait times can extend to weeks or even months.
"We've been able to structure our system so that we really minimize the backlog and actually have no backlog in the drug section just based on our processes that we've identified and our partnerships with law enforcement," Henry said. "We're really focusing our efforts on those cases that are most meaningful to the criminal justice system."
Henry said the state's forensic scientists have been driven by their successes in aiding law enforcement in identifying a new wave of drugs.
"There's also a sense of satisfaction of being that forensic chemist that's able to identify a new compound that nobody's seen before and be able to take that result and see it all the way through to it being scheduled," Henry said.
