New Drug Tests Ask One Question: Would You Make a Good Cop?

When Public Safety Requires Your Open Mouth

On December 15 2025, in what police are calling a “positive” development for road safety, the New Zealand Government quietly launched roadside drug testing in Wellington. Officials insist the initiative is simply meant to deter impaired driving—but independent sources now reveal a far more ambitious national project: the Government wants your DNA.

The Government claims that the newly introduced roadside drug testing regime rolling out across Wellington is about road safety. It insists this while collecting thousands of saliva samples from motorists and storing them long enough to confirm lab results, which, coincidentally, is also long enough to extract DNA. Officials say this is normal. The public, however, has begun to notice that “normal” is doing a lot of heavy lifting these days.

Under the new system, drivers can be stopped at random and asked to provide a saliva sample to test for recent use of cannabis, methamphetamine, MDMA, or cocaine. Refusal earns you a $400 fine, 75 demerit points, and a 12-hour driving ban. 

Police say the tests are about deterrence. Critics say the technology is imperfect. Studies and overseas trials of rapid roadside drug screening devices show that a significant portion of initial positive results—in some drug classes, as many as one in four—later turn out to be false alarms once laboratory confirmation is done.

But the Government’s commitment to these tests persists, despite concerns from medical professionals, civil liberties groups, and anyone who has ever taken a prescription medication and then driven a car. Why push ahead with technology that misfires so often?

Because, according to a growing body of late-night theorists, bored policy students, and people who have read exactly one bioethics article, the drug testing isn’t really about drugs at all.

It’s about DNA.

Saliva, after all, is not just a carrier of the truth about your weekend plans. It’s a genetic signature. A blueprint. A tiny wet resume of who you are and what you could become if grown in a lab beneath the Beehive. And when you place this quiet nationwide swabbing exercise alongside another inconvenient fact—that New Zealand Police are facing a persistent staffing shortage—a new, more creative explanation emerges.

New Zealand is short on cops. Officially, the Government has promised hundreds of additional officers. Unofficially, recruitment has struggled to keep up with attrition, retirements, and the siren song of Australia, where Kiwi cops can earn more money and afford houses with walls. Some districts have been operating under sustained vacancy pressure. Applications fluctuate. Training pipelines bottleneck. The maths is unflattering.

So what do you do when you need more police, but humans are slow, expensive, and increasingly aware of their worth?

You clone them.

Not current police, of course—that would be far too confusing. You clone civilians. People already out there navigating traffic, obeying laws (mostly), and demonstrating a willingness to comply with authority by voluntarily getting swabbed on the side of the road.

The plan unfolds elegantly. First, expand roadside drug testing. Frame it as safety. Collect saliva at scale. Build a genetic archive robust enough to support future “innovation.” Meanwhile, subtly expand the idea that ordinary citizens can act as law enforcement through mechanisms like citizen’s arrest. Normalise the idea that everyone already has a little bit of a cop in them.

Then, when recruitment targets inevitably fall short, pivot.

“Good news,” the Government announces. “We’ve solved the police shortage. The police were inside you all along.”

The clones, we are told, would be efficient. Conflict-averse. Already familiar with Wellington’s one-way road system. They would emerge pre-trained in passive aggression and queue discipline. Finally, a police force that understands the emotional complexity of finding a park on Cuba Street!

Officials deny any cloning agenda exists, pointing out that the saliva samples are used strictly for confirming test accuracy and are disposed of according to protocol. They emphasise that roadside drug testing is comparable to alcohol breath testing, despite the key difference that alcohol breath tests don’t accidentally accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit one quarter of the time.

That assurance further lands differently after it emerged in October 2025 that more than 30,000 police alcohol breath tests were recorded without ever being conducted—phantom data entered to satisfy targets rather than reflect reality. An internal audit identified that simulated tests were logged due to quota pressure. Disciplinary scrutiny followed, though senior leadership maintained that performance goals had still actually been met. 

This is revealing: if accuracy is flexible but volume is essential, roadside testing begins to look less like measurement and more like throughput. In that context, the expansion of saliva testing feels less incidental. When the system doesn’t require a real driver to generate real data, it’s reasonable to ask what, exactly, needs to be real at all?

Still, the optics are challenging. A government collecting genetic material. A policing workforce under strain. A testing regime with known reliability issues being rolled out anyway. In this environment, it’s hardly surprising that Wellington’s population—already prone to overthinking—has begun connecting dots that were technically never meant to touch.

The Government assures the public there is nothing to worry about. This is not surveillance. This is not genetic harvesting. This is not preparation for a future in which every false positive is merely a precursor to conscription into the cloned constabulary.

And yet.

If you’re going to ask people to surrender bodily material under threat of punishment, deploy technology with a high error rate, and do it in a country quietly scrambling to staff its police force—you have to expect some imagination will fill the gaps.

After all, when the state asks for your spit, the least it can do is explain what it plans to do with the rest of you.

Disclaimer (again): this is satire.