Hound Labs in the News

The device would be able to test if someone had smoked within the past three hours. Some locals […] say that marijuana breathalyzers could crack down on impaired driving and it could be beneficial to businesses.

Developing the breath test has been “amazingly challenging science,” but building a device to do it has grown exponentially more important as more and more jurisdictions legalize both medical and recreational marijuana use, Lynn said.

Lynn said he expects the Hound Labs device will also be used in the workplace, where employers can ensure that workers are not high on the job, and employees won’t face sanctions if they partied the day before.

Old tests for marijuana looked for trace elements in things like blood, urine, and hair. But legalization changed all of this. Suddenly marijuana testing became a spectrum, with the need to delineate between the person who threw five on it a week ago, but who still has evidence of weed in their bodily fluids, and the person who’s dangerously blazed right this moment.

Shawn Ellis, a managing director at NFP Ventures, sees Hound’s device as an alternative to test methods currently used across industries like construction and trucking. Those tests can’t distinguish between someone who just smoked and someone who used several days before.

“The good thing is that if it is not in your breath, then you are very unlikely to have used recently,” said Dr. Lynn.