The oregon state police (OSP), forensic services division (FSD) provides scientific, technical and investigative support to the criminal justice system through the collection and forensic analysis…

The State Police Oregon Department (OSP) is being awarded a $500,000 Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance under the Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grant Program (CFDA 16.742). The grant will fund the purchase of an additional liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) instrument for the OSP Forensic Services Division to increase specimen analysis capacity and redundancy for both post-mortem drug testing in blood and driving under the influence of intoxicants (DUII) drug testing in blood. This will allow the OSP to expand its forensic laboratory capabilities to analyze blood specimens for drug-impaired driving cases, rather than relying solely on urine testing, which is unable to quantify active drug concentrations. The grant will be executed over a 3-year period from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2027.

The oregon state police (OSP), forensic services division (FSD) provides scientific, technical and investigative support to the criminal justice system through the collection and forensic analysis of evidence. The division, accredited by american national standards institute (ansi) national accreditation board (anab) to the ISO:IEC 17025:2017, provides the state's only full-service forensic laboratory system. The division provides services to all criminal justice agencies from its five forensic laboratories located in portland, springfield, central point, bend, and pendleton. There are 141 authorized positions in the division. For many years, the OSP FSD laboratory has been under pressure by the legal and scientific community to analyze blood specimens for driving under the influence of intoxicants (duii) casework where drugs other than alcohol are suspected. Currently oregon is a "urine state" that only analyzes urine specimens for drugs in duii cases. Urine specimens are useful for determining if a drug was consumed at some point in the relatively recent past, but the detected drugs are not active when in the urine. For this reason, the specimens are not quantitated to determine their concentration in the body. Drugs in blood specimens, however, contain drugs that are active in the body and can be quantitated to determine the concentration of each drug. Oregon is one of only a few, if not the last remaining state, still lacking a statewide program that analyzes duii evidence for the presence of drugs in blood. The FSD toxicology unit is currently receiving 1,170 requests of all toxicology types per month, or 14,000 requests per year and of these requests, 2,200 (annually) are duii urine specimens and 3,200 (annually) are blood alcohol requests. The FSD is proposing to use grant funds for the purchase of an additional liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) instrument for increased specimen capacity and redundancy to be used for both post-mortem drugs in blood requests and all duii drugs in blood requests, and administrative costs.