Tampa, FL — Rebecca Shaw, a mother of four who has never been in trouble with the law before, ended up spending five months in jail because a field drug test falsely identified her vitamins as opiates.
One night, Rebecca’s car ran out of gas and she was stranded on the side of the road. When an officer pulled up behind her she was hoping that she would get some help. However, instead, he asked to search her car.
Not thinking that she was doing anything wrong, Rebecca allowed him to search her car, and when he did, he found vitamins and accused her of having oxycodone.
“He said, ‘They don’t look like vitamins. They look like oxycodone,’” Rebecca told Fox13.
The officer immediately ran a field drug test on the pills that he found and got a positive reading for opiates.
Rebecca became one of many women and men to suffer horrific fates at the hands of negligent cops and their continued use of faulty field drug test kits.
In fact, tens of thousands have been convicted and served time — even earning the black mark of a felony — for crimes they likely didn’t commit, according to a report, because the cases against them relied on horribly unreliable field drug test kits.
So prone to errors are the tests, courts won’t allow their submission as evidence. However, their continued use by law enforcement — coupled with a 90 percent rate at which drug cases are resolved through equally dubious plea deals — needlessly ruins thousands of lives.
Rebecca Shaw is one of these people.
“My heart just sank. I said, ‘That’s wrong!’ It felt like my whole life was over. It was terrible,” she said.
Rebecca was arrested and charged with trafficking oxycodone, and since she was unable to pay the $5,000 bond she was forced to sit in jail for months.
“My kids were devastated. I was away for five months. I cried constantly. It was scary being in there and having a public defender that didn’t believe me,” Rebecca said.
After Rebecca’s husband was able to raise the funds to bail her out, she said to wait another seven months for the official test results to come back from the lab, which ultimately determined that the pills were vitamins and not oxycodone.
“They’re putting innocent people in jail and ruining people’s lives,” Rebecca said, adding that she was considering a lawsuit.
Sadly, Rebecca’s story is extremely common and happens every day throughout the US. The standard $2 field drug test, manufactured by The Safariland Group, have been proven to be unreliable. And according to the manufacturer, should not be used as a stand-alone test for convictions related to drug possession.
Studies have shown how everyday foods, spices, and medicine tested positive in field drug tests. In one experiment, scientists even discovered that air could set off false positive for these tests.
According to Forensic Resources:
“The director of a lab recognized by the International Association of Chiefs of Police for forensic science excellence has called field drug testing kits “totally useless” due to the possibility of false positives. In laboratory experiments, at least two brands of field testing kits have been shown to produce false positives in tests of Mucinex, chocolate, aspirin, chocolate, and oregano.”
Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, a Ph.D. chemist and former FBI lab supervisor, has also voiced objections, saying that he has “no confidence at all in those test kits.”
According to the national litigation and public policy organization, the Innocence Project, at any given time there are an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 innocent people currently locked in a cage in U.S. prisons.
Over the years, The Free Thought Project has reported on countless stories of odd things creating false positives in field drug tests. We have seen people put behind bars for possession of things like drywall, glazed donuts, crackers, kitty litter and baking soda.
A post on steemit this week by @doitvoluntarily showed some of the most recent instances of false positives from field tests.
My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion and Manifesto of the Free Humans
I just won a 3-year-long battle with cancer, and will be working to help others through my experience, if you wish to contribute to my medical bills, consider subscribing to my podcast on Patreon.
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