“We were dumbfounded,” Artemis says. Police told them they could be facing years in bridewell for exporting narcotics, because 2.5 pounds of material found in their carry-on bag tested positive for hashish. “All we knew was that we didn’t have drugs.”

They were telling the truth. They didn’t have drugs. They had chocolate.

The couple were caught up in what civil libertarians, of the whole not private defenders and some narcotics experts say is a growing point in dispute: the use of unreliable field drug-test kits as the basis to arrest free from the guilt people forward unlawful drug charges.

The inexpensive test kits are used by virtually each police sphere of duty in the country and by federal agents, including Customs officers at the nationality’session borders. The kits test doubtful materials, and a positive result in general leads to an arrest and court date, pending again sophisticated tests done after the sample is sent to a lab.

The kits use powerful acids that act again with the substance in a plastic bag. If the liquid turns a undisputed redness, it is a considered a unconditional consequence. But a include of legal products and plants test positive: chocolate for hashish; rosemary for marijuana; and unaffected soaps for the “date-rape drug” GHB.

“The tests accept no validity,” says framer FBI narcotics inquirer Frederick Whitehurst. And like greater quantity systematized products come on the market, “the potential for civil rights violations when these grounded on probable evidence tests are out there is phenomenal.”

Although police have been using the scene of military operations test kits for decades, “there’s not one regulation, no blunder that these unsalable article tests perform in any way,” says Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps President David Bronner, whose products accept tested positive for GHB.

With the growth of organic and natural foods and products, experts say arrests may increase.

“We are alarmed by ways and means of the growing number of the multitude who have been taken to penitentiary as far as concerns simply possessing organic products,” says Ronnie Cummins, mentor of the Organic Consumers Association.

On Aug. 29, Artemis and Obadia, founders of Living Libations, a company that makes vital and consistent with nature food and grace products in Haliburton, Ontario, were cleared of the charges when lab tests showed they were simply passionate chocolate.