Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

Questions:

- What do you think the likelihood/timeline is that these tests will eventually be comparable in speed and accuracy to alcohol breathalyzers?

- Have you yet looked into the legal implications of a cannabis breathalyzer? Does it fall under the same rules and restrictions of a standard breathalyzer?

- How rigorously are you testing for false positives? Can you tell someone who has taken drugs but they have worn off vs someone who is currently high?

- Will you be making your data open source? Companies that sell proprietary technology to police departments can notoriously complicate legal cases when they do not disclose technical limitations or the possibilities of false positives or negatives.

- Will you be restricting your product sales only to regions where marijuana is already legal? (If it's already illegal, they have other more accurate ways of establishing possession, I presume they shouldn't need this device except for nefarious purposes).

I seem to recall reading that almost all cases of accidents where the driver tested positive for cannabis, there was another drug involved - usually alcohol.

To be clear, I'm not saying it's OK to drive under the influence of any psychoactive drug - it's plainly not. But I worry that legalised cannabis is going to be demonised by people with something to sell, and about the motivations of the sellers.

It's going to be fairly easy to test this. You take one group of people who haven't smoked in the last few hours and you test them. Make sure it doesn't go off. You take another group who have smoked (I'm sure plenty of college students would be happy to sign up for this trial) and you test them, make sure it does go off. It's pretty simple. It's a machine with an empirical number, so you don't even have to do this double blind.

And if it doesn't give good results? It won't hold up in court. Every lawyer defending someone with a positive result (whether false positive or true positive) will argue that the device isn't accurate and the case gets tossed (or even the ability to use these as evidence). If it doesn't hold up in court, police really won't have much incentive to use these anyway.