Jamaican marijuana company’s partner develops ganja breathalyser

Apollon, which has partnered with Jamaican medical marijuana company, JAMED, is developing a breathalyser which will help police determine if motorists are driving under the influence of ganja.

Testing drivers for ganja can be tricky because the effect of smoking the drug can take up to three hours to wear off, but the ingredient which causes impairment – Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – can take up to 48 hours to leave the body.

Apollon CEO Dr Stephen Barnhill said that testing will be done to identify the metabolites which can be used to determine how much time has passed since a person smoked the weed.

“When you inhale something, it changes metabolically in the system,” Barnhill said. “We will have people inhale or vape cannabis… take a sample of their breath before they smoke, then take breath samples every 30 minutes after they smoke to look for changes in the mass spectrometer that go up and come down within three hours.”

The device has a strip that can provide police officers with preliminary results on the spot, according to Dr Herbert Fritsche, chief medical officer of Apollon. It also has a microchip which would be used for further analysis in a lab.

Still, the question which has not yet been answered is: how much marijuana smoke intake is a legally acceptable limit?

Loop News Service