Chemist’s Job an Overdose of Cocaine Tests

Jason Wasserman no longer gets a kick from cocaine.

Every year, millions of dollars worth of the stuff passes through his hands. And every work day, without fail, he gets a new shipment. But it has become a bore.

Wasserman is one of three chemists employed by the Los Angeles Police Department in the San Fernando Valley. He and two colleagues at the department’s Van Nuys Station do 50 to 100 drug analyses a week. The vast majority of these are cocaine-related.

“I like it when we do something different,” said the soft-spoken Wasserman, a 20-year veteran of the Police Department’s crime lab operation as he cut open an envelope containing a suspect substance.

When he started this job, the lab was regularly testing suspected heroin, LSD and marijuana. They still do occasionally, and sometimes more exotic substances come in. “It’s interesting when we have to do something like extract a hallucinogen from mushrooms,” he said.

But this envelope, like almost all he would open that day, contained a small hunk of suspected cocaine. He noted that this piece, confiscated during a bust on the night of March 16 at De Soto Avenue and Roscoe Boulevard in Canoga Park, would be a relatively easy sample with which to work. Some samples come to him still packed in drywall or wood where they were found. Others come directly from body searches.

“We get them after someone’s stomach has been pumped,” said the Police Department’s chief forensic chemist Michele Kestler, who supervises the operation of the Van Nuys lab. “We get them from all possible body orifices.”

Wasserman points out a sample he had tested earlier that morning in which all the little pieces of rock cocaine were individually wrapped in plastic. “Can you imagine the work that went into that?” he asked, almost admiringly. “That way a dealer could carry the pieces in his mouth.

“Of course if he would have swallowed them, he would have died.”

“That would have been a shame,” one of his colleagues remarked.

Wasserman placed the new sample on a counter in front of a rack of small bottles containing chemical solutions.

“The methods we use come out of basic chemistry discovered by the Germans 100 years ago,” he said, cutting off a small slice of the sample with a knife.

The Van Nuys office has a few pieces of the high-tech, state-of-the-art equipment now in crime labs. But most of the laser and digital gizmos belonging to the Police Department are downtown in Parker Center.

That’s OK with Wasserman.

“I still enjoy what we call wet chemistry,” he said, reaching for a well-used bottle of cobalt thiocyanate. He mixed the chemical with a bit of the suspect substance in a small vial. The substance didn’t dissolve, indicating it might be cocaine in its rock form, which involves higher criminal penalties than powder cocaine.

To another vial Wasserman added a drop of acetic acid and the substance instantly dissolved, turning a deep shade of blue.

“That’s a positive for rock cocaine,” Wasserman said.

He did a backup chemical test and got identical results. Then he made a couple of slides so that the substance, mixed with chemicals from his laboratory arsenal, could be examined under a microscope.

“Look for the crystal formation that looks like eagle wings,” he said, offering a view through the scope. The crystals, shaded blue-green and yellow by color filters in the scope, show up brilliantly against a magenta background.

The eagle feather-like formation was easily spotted.

“That is a positive identification,” he said with a nod, and he can afford to be sure. In all the years Wasserman has been doing the drug tests, none of his findings has been successfully challenged in court.

He noted his findings on a form, put the sample back in its envelope and secured it with new tape seals. The whole process took about half an hour.

For all the cocaine he has handled, Wasserman said, he has never sampled the drug himself, except once, inadvertently. “I was breaking up 30 kilos that came in and I inhaled some of the powder,” he said.

“All I got was a terrible headache.”