Kimberly Edds from the Register asks, "Why does it take so long for toxicology results to come back from the crime lab? 
And what do those really prove any way?"
Director Dean Gialamas helps with the answer: "[T]he folks at the Sheriff's crime lab can figure it out. All it takes is a little blood or tissue and a lot of time – anywhere from a few days to eight weeks. And they move through as many as 20,000 alcohol and drug cases a year – with a staff of 13, said Dean Gialamas, director of the county's Sheriff- Coroner's forensic sciences lab."
See Kimberly's entire report here.
Here's some more information on what our Forensic Science Services Division is doing:
SABRE (Sexual Assault Backlog Reduction Effort)
The Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Crime Laboratory received a grant under the California Cold Hit Program from the California Governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning (OCJP) on July 01, 2000. The grant provided resources to screen, profile and confirm DNA evidence from unsolved, suspectless sexual assault cases and homicides with a sexual component which occurred between October 01, 1994 and October 1, 2003. The project was designated by the department as SABRE – the Sexual Assault Backlog Reduction Effort.
337 previously unanalyzed cases were submitted to the Sheriff’s Crime Laboratory from all Orange County law enforcement agencies. 228 DNA profiles were obtained from these cases and entered into the DNA database (CODIS). The SABRE team also retrieved and reanalyzed cases that had been previously tested with older technology to generate new DNA profiles compatible with the current CODIS database. In addition, 38 cases from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office were analyzed by the OCSD Crime Laboratory under a contract agreement.
This resulted in 29 cold hits and 28 case to case hits by the end of the program. OCSD had the state’s 100th cold hit (a sexual assault case from Fountain Valley PD) and the state’s 2000th cold hit (a Costa Mesa PD sexual assault case).
Some project highlights include:
The first cold hit identified the suspect of a 1980 Seal Beach PD rape and homicide of an elderly woman. This was a national database hit and the suspect was incarcerated in a Florida state prison. A sexual assault case in Florida was also linked to the suspect. This case has not yet gone to trial because of the mental health of the suspect.
Case to case links were revealed in 2002 between a Huntington Beach rape of an elderly woman, two Los Alamitos rapes of elderly women, the “Belmont Shores” serial rapes in Los Angeles County and a rape series in Washington State. The suspect, Mark Rathbun, was later apprehended and tried in a LA County Court for the crimes.
James SHIPP was a suspected serial rapist arrested by Orange Police Department in 2001 for two sexual assaults on cleaning women. He was also linked by DNA to an unsolved 1997 Santa Ana PD rape case, an unsolved 1995 Fountain Valley PD rape, a Tustin PD attempted sexual assault and an unsolved 1998 Irvine PD homicide.