Alexander Ryking

You should wonder about the motives of a dude who once touted racism, and now wants to make it easier for black people to take drugs.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisi) January 2, 2012

Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s plan to test welfare recipients for drugs is costing the state money, despite his claims that the program would actually save tax dollars.

A WFTV investigation found that out of the 40 recipients tested by Department of Central Florida’s (DCF) region, only two resulted in positive results. And one of those tests is being appealed.

Under the rules of the program, the state must reimburse recipients who receive negative test results. The state paid about $1,140 for the 38 negative tests, while saving less than $240 a month by denying benefits over the two positive tests.

A new technology that analyzes the sweat from a person’s fingertips looks to revolutionize the drug testing market, providing on-site results in minutes with a test so advanced it can even detect marijuana intoxication.

Using gold nanoparticles and special antibodies, the tech produced by British firm Intelligent Fingerprinting latches on to metabolites on the fingerprint and turns a specific color depending on which drug byproducts are detected.

While it can be configured to search for drugs like nicotine, methadone and cocaine, it also presents another innovation: helping to determine if someone is actively intoxicated on marijuana.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s decision [June 30th] to retroactively apply an amendment from the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 to inmates is a potential boon for crack offenders who were hit with the old 100-to-1 sentencing guidelines before the law was passed.

The commission voted to apply the 18-to-1 crack sentencing disparity reduction — which was enacted last year after 25 years of the 100-to-1 disparity in punishment of crack offenders and cocaine offenders — to cases where inmates were sentenced before August of last year.

Laura Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union warns that this doesn’t mean all eligible people will be freed. “Not every crack cocaine offender will have his sentence reduced,” she said in a call yesterday. But more than 12,000 people, 96 percent of whom are black and Latino, are now able to go before a judge to seek a reduction.

Judges will decide whether to reduce sentences by weighing behavior in prison, the nature of the offense, and whether a weapon was involved. Federal judge Patti B. Saris, the chair of the commission, said that they expect the average sentence reduction to be by about 3 years, and that offenders will now average around 10 years in prison.

Still, Murphy says, “what we really need is statutory retroactivity,” meaning that Congress has to vote to make the entire Fair Sentencing Act retroactive. The Sentencing Commission vote only applied certain amendments from the act retroactively — leaving things like mandatory minimums in place. “There will be efforts to eliminate the U.S. Sentencing Commission,” she says, which is why having the statute changed by Congress is critical.