The Horry County Police Department has its own drug lab and chemist, which process drugs for the northeast region of the state.
Only a handful of counties in the state have a drug lab, and many different police agencies across this part of South Carolina use Horry County to process their drug evidence.
Special drug-processing machines, and the chemist who oversees them, helped process more than 800 drug cases and 4,000 pieces of evidence in 2018. According to HCPD, the workload in the lab has surged in recent years.
“She is definitely seeing an increase in the number of items that she is having to process of drug evidence and the complexity of those drugs,” Capt. John Harrelson said about the lab’s chemist.
The chemist, who HCPD is choosing not to identify due to her role in court proceedings, is constantly keeping up with the changing drug trends– what police call “designer drugs.”
“Drugs that are created in a lab that necessarily maybe have not popped up anywhere yet,” Harrelson explained.
SLED has a drug lab that processes drugs for the whole state, but having a lab on-site is more efficient.
“It’s very beneficial for us,” Harrelson said. “We’re able to typically provide results quicker than the state lab is just because of the volume of cases that they have to process.”
Last week the Horry County public safety committee gave Chief Joseph Hill the green light to request grant money to purchase a new $80,000 drug processing machine.
“We can run multiple samples from multiple cases, and that’s what we do to kind of streamline our reporting analysis.” Hill told News13 after the meeting. “We have a very old one that it’s on its last leg, so this one is gonna augment that operation.”
Harrelson said it will also allow the lab to expand the number of cases it processes.
According to HCPD, the lab has processed drug evidence for SCDNR, DHEC, and pretty much every police agency in Horry County and several in Georgetown County.
