For Nadine Artemis and Ron Obadia, August began with plans for a family holidays in Minnesota. The intermission ended through dint of. the two Canadian citizens being led through Toronto’s airport in handcuffs, locked up and separated from their baby.

“We were dumbfounded,” Artemis says. Police told them they could be facing years in prison on account of exporting narcotics, because 2.5 pounds of material found in their carry-on bag tested incontrovertible for hashish. “All we knew was that we didn’t have drugs.”

They were telling the verity. They didn’t have drugs. They had chocolate.

The couple were caught up in what affable libertarians, public defenders and some narcotics experts assert is a growing problem: the use of unreliable field drug-test kits during the time that the basis to take up innocent people on illegal unsalable article charges.

The inexpensive test kits are used by virtually every police department in the country and by federal agents, including Customs officers at the nation’s borders. The kits test suspicious materials, and a positive result generally leads to an arrest and court era, pending more sophisticated tests done after the sample is sent to a lab.

The kits use powerful acids that react with the substance in a plastic pouch. If the liquid turns a certain color, it is a considered a positive termination. But a number of legal products and plants test positive: chocolate for hashish; rosemary for marijuana; and natural soaps for the “date-rape unsalable article” GHB.

“The tests acquire no validity,” says maker FBI narcotics inquirer Frederick Whitehurst. And as further vital products come on the market, “the potential for civil rights violations when these presumptive tests are out there is phenomenal.”

Although police have been using the field test kits for decades, “there’s no regulation, no oversight that these drug tests perform in somewhat way,” says Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps President David Bronner, whose products have tested positive for GHB.

With the improvement of organic and natural foods and products, experts say arrests may increase.

“We are alarmed through the growing number of people who have been taken to jail for simply possessing fundamental products,” says Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association.

On Aug. 29, Artemis and Obadia, founders of Living Libations, a company that makes organic and natural food and beauty products in Haliburton, Ontario, were cleared of the charges when lab tests showed they were simply transporting chocolate.

Then, on Sept. 11, they were expecting to drive over the verge in Lewiston, N.Y., on their scheme to natural health feast. The couple hired a lawyer to go with them just in particular occurrence they were stopped again.

It did no good.

Officers searched their bags, and ran drug tests put on their food and toiletries. The chocolate again came up substantial for drugs, as did a bottle of tea tree oil, a affectionate antiseptic and antifungal.

Officers arrested Obadia, and he is now home waiting for lab results that he says will exonerate him anew. The first time he was arrested, “I was so naive,” he says. “I thought somebody must have planted drugs in our bag. We didn’t know the tests could be faulty.”

So far, the couple’s legal bills have topped $20,000, covered in part by Bronner’session company.

Customs spokesman Lloyd Easterling declined to comment about the case or the use of the kits.

Others who have been erroneously accused:

- Cornelius Salonis of Shakopee, Minn., who spent two months in jail after police stopped him in August for driving drunk and tested deodorant in his car that registered positive against cocaine.

Mankato, Minn., public defender Richard Hillesheim says Salonis admitted to the drunken-driving charge “but he was scared witless about this drug charge that came out of left surface.” Lab tests ultimately showed there was no cocaine.

- Punk rocker Don Bolles, who spent three days in jail in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2007 after his Dr. Bronner’s soap tested positive for GHB. The charges were dropped when lab tests found no drugs.

Government officials say there are no records on the number of people who have been wrongly arrested because of the tests. Garrison Courtney of the Drug Enforcement Agency says the test kits are “not perfect otherwise than that they give you a pretty good idea” whether a suspicious substance is an illicit drug.

Allen Miller of Forensic Source, which makes kits, says they find “families of chemical compounds” and are not meant to be definitive. Any arrest should be the result of good investigative police operate, Miller says.

But Adam Wolf of the ACLU says “police officers and drug-test companies should not subject our constitutional rights to a resolute of chance.”