An NII machine in Nogales, AZ. (Image source)

There’s bound to be a lot of discussion of the Biden-Trump presidential debates last night, but I want to skip all the political prognostication and talk about the real issue: fentanyl-detecting machines.

Joe Biden says:

And I wanted to make sure we use the machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big machines that roll over everything that comes across the border, and it costs a lot of money. That was part of this deal we put together, this bipartisan deal.
More fentanyl machines, were able to detect drugs, more numbers of agents, more numbers of all the people at the border. And when we had that deal done, he went – he called his Republican colleagues said don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.
He never argued. It’s not a good bill. It’s a really good bill. We need those machines. We need those machines. And we’re coming down very hard in every country in Asia in terms of precursors for fentanyl. And Mexico is working with us to make sure they don’t have the technology to be able to put it together. That’s what we have to do. We need those machines.

Wait, what machines?

You can remotely, non-destructively detect that a bag of powder contains fentanyl rather than some other, legal substance? And you can sense it through the body of a car?

My god. The LEO community must be holding out on us. If that tech existed, we’d have tricorders by now.

What’s actually going on here?

What’s Up With Fentanyl-Detecting Machines?

First of all, Biden didn’t make them up.

This year, the Department of Homeland Security reports that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has deployed “Non-Intrusive Inspection” at the US’s southwest border:

“By installing 123 new large-scale scanners at multiple POEs along the southwest border, CBP will increase its inspection capacity of passenger vehicles from two percent to 40 percent, and of cargo vehicles from 17 percent to 70 percent.”

In fact, there’s something of a scandal about how many of these scanners have been sitting in warehouses but not actually deployed. CBP Commissioner Troy Miller complained to NBC News that the scanners are sitting idle because Congress hasn’t allocated the budget for installing them.

These are, indeed, big drive-through machines. They X-ray cars, allowing most traffic to keep flowing without interruption.

Could an X-ray machine really detect fentanyl inside a car?

To answe...

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