You may have seen the ankle bracelets that are capable of monitoring alcohol consumption. The devices, which measure vapors given off by perspiration, have become increasingly common and have even been spotted on celebrities like Lindsay Lohan.

I was curious if we had any such technology here in Kitsap, so I asked Kitsap County’s district court administrator Maury Baker, who oversees the largest court that handles DUI in the county.

“We have not used these and have been aware of them since they hit the market,” Baker wrote me in an email.

UPDATE: Monday, 9:11 a.m.: I got an email from a local attorney who told me they’re in use in Bainbridge Island and Poulsbo’s municipal courts. I’ll get more info on them today.

I showed Baker an article in the Dallas Morning News about the device’s use in Texas. You can read it here.

But Baker feels Kitsap’s method of monitoring — the ignition interlock device (IID) or “blow and go” — has an advantage over the anklet.

“As the article states, the (ankle) sensor does not stop one from driving drunk,” Baker wrote. “The IID disables the vehicle.”

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Turns out that a 19-year-old man taken to Harrison Medical Center for swallowing meth wasn’t the only one last Friday to have gobbled up amphetamines.

In remarkably coincidental fashion, at the same time a suspect ate a gram and a half of meth as Kitsap County Sheriff’s deputies investigated a drug deal, Bremerton police were heading to a Sixth Street cafe for a report of a man trying to steal things from their bathroom.

The cops found him Friday night “sweating profusely,” with the bathroom in a state of disarray. Police reported that he’d told them he’d “smoked a twenty sack and swallowed a forty sack of meth.” He began going into convulsions, officers said.

Darcy Himes, spokeswoman for Harrison Medical Center, said the man was treated and released from the hospital early Saturday morning.

It goes without saying that ingesting meth in any form is risky and dangerous. But eating it? Wikipedia says — and I’d take this with a grain of salt — it’s actually the safest way to ingest it. But from Kitsap’s oddly timed examples here — requiring hospital trips — I’d say we have some anecdotal evidence to refute that.

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There were no “confidential informants,” when Roy Alloway became a drug detective. The job was to “jump in there and buy drugs from people,” he said.

Alloway, who retired this past month — and whose strand of pot is featured on the cover of the Seattle Weekly — described the underground drug world as “just a bunch of circles,” when I interviewed him. “You just try and get one of the people in the circle to flip.”

From there, it’s a matter of working up the chain. “You take down the highest level (the informants) deal with,” he said. “One arrest becomes three and three become nine.”

Drug detectives often equate working with informants as a kind of baby-sitting.

“They’re not boy scouts,” Alloway said. “They’ll steal from you, take the drugs you¹re trying to buy, even perform sexual favors to pocket the money.”

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The West Sound Narcotics Enforcement Team — WestNET for short — often emerges briefly from complex drug investigations with a story of arrests and prosecutions. But most of its work is done in the depths of the drug trade, following up tips, working with informants and going up the supply chain to bigger criminal enterprises.

But what do we know about our local drug task force? Here are five things about this cadre of detectives you might not know. Many of these questions are ones I often get from readers. The answers come directly from detectives on the task force.

How are they funded? Yes, they do get federal money. But local agencies also pay to send their personnel to work there. The Bremerton Police Department, Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office and others make up the seven detectives in the unit. Its sergeant is Carlos Rodriguez, who comes from the Washington State Patrol.

Is any medical marijuana user safe from them? WestNET’s busts of people who have medical marijuana cards from a doctor have made the news recently and frequently. But are there those with cards whom they ignore? Rodriguez says yes. They look to the state’s rule of a maximum of 15 plants and 24 ounces of pot for medical users. He said they leave those within that rule alone, unless there’s evidence of trafficking or selling. In cases where there are more than 15 plants or 24 ounces, he said they take the plants or product over limit, leave the rest and then forward a report to the appropriate prosecutor’s office for review.

How many of WestNET’s cases involve those who have medical marijuana recommendations? Rodriguez said that in 2009, 20 of their 57 marijuana grow investigations claimed to use pot for medical purposes. This year, five of 13 have said the same.

Does WestNET investigate anything besides marijuana? Yes. They have mobility to move up the ladder of sellers of drugs of any kind. Because they are a small unit, a big case can often skew their stats. For instance, one such investigation took the amount of club drugs they confiscated in 2008 to 2009 from 281 doses to 27,500.

What’s a breakdown of the amount of drugs the task force took in 2009? According to Rodriguez:

Marijuana: about 3,500 plants in 57 cases;

Cocaine: 37.6 grams in five cases;

Club drugs and doses: 27,500 in five cases;

OxyContin and other prescription drugs: 2,350 grams in 11 cases;

Meth: Almost 2,000 grams in 22 cases;

Heroin: About 310 grams in five cases.

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Forty years. Hundreds of thousands of lives. Around $1 trillion dollars. The AP says those are the costs of the so-called “War on Drugs” in America and wonders: was it worth it?

I wonder subsequently: can such a “war” be won in the future?

Martha Mendoza’s critique examines not only the past but what the Obama Administration plans to do with a record $15 billion-plus budget to fight drugs. There’ll be more emphasis on prevention and treatment, says U.S. drug czar and former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske.

I’d suggest reading the piece for yourself. But here’s the thrust of the story, which presents the drug war as a frustrating stalemate:

“In 1970, proponents said beefed-up law enforcement could effectively seal the southern U.S. border and stop drugs from coming in. Since then, the U.S. used patrols, checkpoints, sniffer dogs, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, drone aircraft — and even put up more than 1,000 miles of steel beam, concrete walls and heavy mesh stretching from California to Texas.

None of that has stopped the drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy says about 330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine are sold in the United States every year — almost all of it brought in across the borders. Even more marijuana is sold, but it’s hard to know how much of that is grown domestically, including vast fields run by Mexican drug cartels in U.S. national parks.”

It’s of course impossible to say what would have happened if our government hadn’t spent that money. But if nothing else, we know a lot more about drug trafficking and addiction than we did when President Nixon began the fight.

I’ll leave you with the same question: is the drug war still winnable? And if so, how?

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A little too tipsy to drive home? You’d be wise to grab a cab, ride with a sober driver or bunk it for the night if you’re at a friend’s house.

I’ve no doubt you’ve heard these words of wisdom before. But perhaps here’s some you haven’t: if you’ve gotten a few hours of shut eye on someone else’s couch after a night of drinking, that doesn’t mean you’re sober.

Believe it or not, law enforcement doesn’t care if you attempted to “sleep it off,” for awhile, and then still put the keys in the ignition. State trooper Krista Hedstrom said they get Sunday morning DUIs all the time.

“It is very common,” she said.

Such a traffic stop often goes like this, Hedstrom said:

Trooper: “How much have you had to drink?”

Driver: “Nothing. I just woke up.”

Trooper: “But were you drinking last night?”

And whether the drinking was done before sleeping or after, a trooper will conduct a DUI investigation if they have reason to believe you have alcohol in your system, Hedstrom said.

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The Washington State Patrol has created an online database of all breath tests given to DUI defendants. You can find the database here.

Go down to the bottom of the page and click “Enter WebDMS.”Then click on “DataMaster search,” and you can browse the records.

It’s not exactly a breeze to search, however. You must know the “DataMaster” code — basically the location of the DUI breath machine — if you want to look up DUI results in a given period. But here’s one that I know: 140051. That’s the DataMaster machine in the Kitsap County jail.

The operator is the officer that made the DUI arrest. If you scroll to the right, “BrAC1” and “BrAC2” are the results of the two tests. Just plop a decimal point in front of the numbers (e.g. 123 becomes .123) and there you have it.

You cannot see defendant’s names here, only dates of birth.

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Illicit narcotics seem to turn up everywhere. Inside foreclosed homes, in speaker boxes, inside packages of baby clothes. They’ve even shown up here in Bremerton inside ATM machines.

Logically, given their nature as outlawed substances, they’re often hidden creatively. But sometimes, the people hiding them might not even remember where they stowed them away.

Or, in a recent Bremerton case, their user may not have had a chance to take his stash with him.

Police were called to a local pawn shop April 8 after an employee found a baggie of white stuff inside a tool box. Officer confirmed it was meth, and began to try and find out who it belonged to. Their investigation took them to a man, who claimed it belonged to another man, who … well, it could have gone on endlessly. Law enforcement’s best guess was that it was the property of a renter who was jailed, and couldn’t take his stash with him.

Carlos Rodriguez, sergeant in charge of the West Sound Narcotics Enforcement Team, said he’s seen drugs — as well as ill-gotten cash and weapons — in just about every nook and cranny you can think of.

When they’re executing a search warrant at a property, they expect the unexpected.

Rodriguez has found drugs in freezers, in the heads of flashlights, even in body cavities on the suspects themselves. He’s also found guns in walls, and cash at the bottom of suspects’ garbage in wads of toilet paper.

“It could be anywhere,” he said of a suspect’s drugs.

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After writing a story Tuesday about a new brand of “fake weed” substances that are surfacing around the country, I got a tip that Kitsap County’s juvenile drug court staff has also encountered this stuff.

“Spice,” also known as “K2,” and other monikers, got on their radars in late 2009. Two Bremerton teens participating in the drug court were presenting staff with a bit of a puzzle.

“Their (urinalysis tests) were coming up clean,” said drug court probation officer Carrie Prater, who monitors 20 to 30 kids a time through the program. “But their behaviors were that they were using.”

According to the DEA, these products are synthetic marijuana. An herb or spice is sprayed with a chemical that, when smoked like real marijuana, gives a similar high. The products are sold as a potpourri or incense.

Prater said the teens had entered the drug court for using substances unrelated to “Spice.” But one of the teens ordered some from Europe online, she said. He was pulled over while driving and an officer found it.

“We couldn’t even sanction them for it because it wasn’t in the contract yet,” she said.

That has since changed — the drug court contract now says participants can’t take substances that are counterproductive to the treatment process, she said. The Navy, too, has already banned it.

The teen admitted to having used Spice after he was pulled over and found with some. One other teen has also admitted to using it.

Both also told Prater something disturbing: that they’d experienced withdrawals — one of headaches and nausea, the other of anxiety and heart palpitations — when they stopped using it.

Stories from around the country (here’s a couple) confirm these chemicals can have bizarre — and perhaps damaging — effects on the body. The DEA is still studying these compounds, and they have a ways to go before we truly know what their long term effects are.

Early reports of products “made it sound like it was actually safer than marijuana,” Prater said. “When you hear their side effects, it’s definitely not.”

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It could be a rough night for the state’s drunken drivers.

The annual “Night of 1,000 Stars” — with stars being the number of badges on patrol around the state — occurs tonight. Officers will be focusing on intoxicated and aggressive drivers.

Law enforcement agencies in Kitsap County will be out from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m., according to Kitsap County MADD Chair Marsha Masters. They’ll start with a briefing at Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue’s Station 41, on Old Military Road at Fairgrounds Road.

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