Politics
Federal Agency Explains How Marijuana Breathalyzer Development Was Boosted By Post-9/11 Bomb Detection Technology
A federal agency is highlighting how a technique that was created to capture specific compounds from air samples for analysis to help detect bombs after 9/11 is now being used to aid in the development of a marijuana breathalyzer to identify impaired drivers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cited the cannabis technology effort as part of a new post on how scientific discoveries often have unexpected applications.
“Painter Bob Ross taught us that ‘happy accidents’ can make for beautiful art,” the agency said. “Happy accidents also happen in science, when experiments take research in unexpected directions. Probably the most dramatic example is Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin.”
The post, which was published as part of National Forensic Science Week, notes how law enforcement agencies began relying on dogs to help sniff out bombs after the 2001 terrorist attacks but that explosive compounds evolve faster than the animals can be trained to learn their scents. As a result, researcher Tara Lovestead, who now works at NIST, developed a method called the “headspace technique” that separates compounds from air samples in the hopes it could be used as part of an electronic device to do the work of bomb-sniffing dogs.
That post-9/11 work is now the “foundation” for the development of a cannabis breathalyzer, NIST said.
“While sniffer dogs and the human nose can smell the musky odor of cannabis in luggage and from a burning joint, these compounds are not the intoxicant,” the federal agency said. “THC is the intoxicant, and it’s a heavy compound that is difficult to detect in breath. Despite this challenge, industry is working to create breathalyzers for law enforcement and workplace safety.”
Lovestead said that applying the headspace technique to investigate how THC behaves in human breath “has been the most difficult measurement challenge and most rewarding work of my career.”
The NIST post also cites other examples of scientific discoveries having unexpected results, such as human DNA genome mapping aiding forensic DNA testing and techniques developed for clothing recycling being used in crime scene analysis.
“The need to be able to use scientific evidence in court means forensic scientists sometimes have to reach out to other technologies and fields to be able to develop things in more detail,” John Butler, NIST fellow and special assistant to the director for forensic science, said. “And NIST has played a role in many developments in forensic science going back to the 1960s, when automatic fingerprint technology was initially developed at NIST.”
NIST has undertaken a number of cannabis-focused projects in recent years.
In July, NIST published a new report that aims to assist state marijuana officials in developing standards for scales used in the sale of cannabis products.
NIST announced in June that it added dozens of new marijuana components to an official government library of compounds that is used to help identify unknown substances in food, drugs, cosmetics, the environment, body fluids and forensic evidence.
In 2025, NIST hosted a workshop aimed at facilitating “an open and candid discussion” about the development and implementation of technology to test a person’s breath for marijuana impairment.
Also last year, researchers with the agency said they made the first-ever detection of THC in human breath following the consumption of infused edibles—a possible step forward in terms of field testing for cannabis impairment.
NIST has also published a series of reports as part of a project called the Cannabis Laboratory Quality Assurance Program (CannaQAP).
Meanwhile, NIST has made a series of updates to an industry standardization handbook it publishes as a result of cannabis-related stances adopted by the National Conference of Weights and Measures.
