Waimea, Hawaii, resident Kimberly Reyes died July 27 at Hilo Medical Center, 10 days after her insurance provider denied the liver transplant she needed because she had tested positive for marijuan

Phillip S. Smith, Writer/Editor

Two separate efforts to impose random suspicionless drug testing on different groups in Louisiana have failed -- one thanks to a court challenge, the other thanks to politics.

Via Radley Balko, this one is hard to believe:

A decorated ex-cop who claimed he tested positive for cocaine because he ingested the drug during oral sex with his girlfriend can't have his job back, a Manhattan judge has ruled.

Supreme Court Justice Eileen Rakower last month shot down helicopter pilot Jon Goldin's attempt to overturn his April 2008 dismissal from the NYPD.

Goldin, a 15-year veteran, tested positive for cocaine in October 2006 in a random drug test using hairs from his arm.
...
Goldin's lawsuit said the cocaine in his system was the product of "passive ingestion" from performing oral sex on girlfriend Coreen McCarthy, who, once he tested positive, admitted to him that she was a regular cocaine user. [New York Daily News]

Needless to say, this cocaine-ingested-through-oral-sex line sounds like the laugh-out-loud lame excuse of the century. I'm highly inclined to doubt that such a thing is even remotely possible, but as to the question of whether or not the officer was actually using cocaine, I don’t know what to think. If his colleagues are to be believed, the story on this guy is that he's well known for not doing drugs. Supposedly, he's an "adherent of the 'straight edge' lifestyle that rejects substance use" and everyone knows he doesn't get high:

More than 70 friends went to bat for the ex-cop, saying they had never seen him take even a sip of coffee and that he abstained at bars while others drank booze.

I don't know these people, but I trust them more than I trust the drug test itself, because drug tests are bullshit. They're just not accurate. If a bunch of people come forward complaining that someone got railroaded by a drug test, I'm going to assume that's exactly what happened. It's happened before.

Notwithstanding the absurdity of the officer's crazy oral sex explanation, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he's the innocent victim of a false positive drug test result. If officer Goldin is telling the truth, then it's worth taking a moment to contemplate the irony that a cop who lives by a vehement anti-drug philosophy ended up getting screwed over by one of the numerous fraudulent technologies designed to ruin the lives of drug users.

I wonder what he thinks of the drug war now, after finding himself on the receiving end of its virtually infinite incompetence.

A bill by West Virginia Republican state Del.

A Missouri bill that would criminalize drug use by pregnant woman got a hearing Tuesday, but the reception was not very friendly.

In a surprise move, the Indonesian Supreme Court last Friday issued a

The Kansas House Wednesday gave final approval to a bill that requires Kansans who seek public assistance to undergo drug testing.

With states across the country feeling the effects of the economic crisis gripping the land, some legislators are engaging in the cheap politics of resentment as a supposed budget-cutting move.

The Marijuana Policy Project and the Mintwood Media Collective present the findings of a new study, False Positives Equal False Justice. The video exposes how field drug tests used by police and other government agencies give false positives.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djXVnmrlKvE

The Marijuana Policy Project and Mintwood Media Collective will host a press conference at the National Press Club to release a new report that exposes faulty drug test kits used widely by law enforce

 
 
NEWS ADVISORY                                                       CONTACT:       Ryan Fletcher 202-641-0277
Feb. 24, 2009                                                                                           Adam Eidinger 202-744-2671
                                                                          
MARCH 3 PRESS CONFERENCE TO EXPOSE FAULTY DRUG TEST KITS USED WIDELY BY LAW ENFORCEMENT
Report Entitled ‘False Positives Equal False Justice’ to Be Released at National Press Club; Retired FBI Forensics Expert and Victims of False Arrests to Testify

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Tuesday, March 3 at 1 p.m., the Marijuana Policy Project and Mintwood Media Collective will host a press conference at the National Press Club to release a new report that exposes faulty drug test kits used widely by law enforcement. The study, entitled "False Positives Equal False Justice," reveals that the NIK NarcoPouch 908/Duquenois-Levine Reagent field test kit, the most widely used field test for identifying marijuana, as well as the majority of other drug test kits used as the basis for arrest and prosecution by law enforcement have an unacceptably high rate of rendering false positives.
In addition to testimony by experts in the field, as well as those directly impacted by these faulty tests, experiments will be performed at the press conference that will demonstrate the unreliability of various drug tests and their capacity to render false positives. Natural soap, chocolate and newspaper, among other household items, all will test positive for marijuana and other drugs such as GHB in these drug tests, yet these kits continue to be used in both arrests and prosecutions nationwide. These faulty tests result in the unjust arrest, imprisonment and even prosecution of innocent citizens.

WHAT:  Press conference exposing faulty drug tests through the release of a new report entitled "False    
                Positives Equal False Justice"
WHEN:  Tuesday March 3 at 1 p.m.
WHERE: Zenger Room at the National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor - Washington, D.C., 20045
WHO:     Frederic Whitehurst is a retired FBI agent and forensics expert, whose findings are featured
                 extensively in the new report.
 
David Bronner is the president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. In 2007, the results of a NarcoPouch® 928 field drug test of his company’s popular organic soap was used to jail Don Bolles - drummer for the legendary punk band, the Germs – for possession of the drug GHB (Gamma Hydroxy Butyrate). A crime lab confirmation using a more reliable test exonerated Bolles and Dr. Bronner’s soaps of the drug possession charges.
 
John Kelly is a researcher and author of "False Positives Equal False Justice." 
 
Dr. Omar Bagasra is a professor and the director of the South Carolina Center for Biotechnology at Claflin University. He contributed significantly to the report, including testing the specificity of the NIK NarcoPouch with 42 non-marijuana substances following the procedure prescribed by NIK.
 
Rob Kampia is executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project.
 
Ron Obadia and Nadine Artemis are co-owners of Living Libations Inc. They have been arrested twice because their raw chocolate tested positive for hashish with the Duquenois-Levine color chemical test. Upon their first arrest, they were placed in separate rooms and told they faced “life in prison.” Subsequent lab testing proved there was no hashish in the chocolate. Their arrests have resulted in extensive legal bills and other challenges. 

As we noted three weeks ago, the chess world was in turmoil over drug testing in a simmering spat

Philippines President Gloria Arroyo named herself the country's drug czar Monday and ordered government agencies to prepare for battle against big-time drug traffickers.

The World Chess Federation, better known by its French acronym FIDE, has gotten itself into a controversy over drug testing.

A federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia, Monday stopped the Kanawha County school system's plan to randomly drug test teachers in its tracks, issuing a scathing rebuke of the policy and the sc

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Northern California chapter has joined with a small number of students and their parents in filing a

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After several months of discussion, the Kanawha County (Charleston), West Virginia, school board voted 4-1 in October to go ahead with a plan to randomly drug test teachers and other school distric

Here’s drug czar John Walters shamelessly using a young woman’s death as an opportunity to plug student drug testing:

Heroin killed 19-year-old Alicia Lannes, and her parents say she got the drug from a boyfriend.  Experts say that's how most young kids get introduced to drugs: by friends or relatives.
…
While teen drug use is declining, Walters says a Fairfax County heroin ring busted in connection with Lannes' death proves it's still a problem.  He supports a federal program used in more than 4,000 schools to randomly drug test students.

"There's no question in my mind had this young woman been in a school, middle school or high school with random testing," said Walters, "She would not be dead today." [FOX DC]

Walters sounds supremely confident, as usual, yet the reality is that random drug testing is often impotent when it comes to discovering heroin use. Student drug testing programs typically rely on urine tests, which can only detect heroin for 3-4 days after use. Only marijuana -- which stays in your system for up to a month – can be effectively detected this way. Thus, random testing actually incentivizes students to experiment with more dangerous drugs like heroin that increase your chances of passing a drug test.

And thanks to the complete failure of the drug war, heroin is stronger today than ever before:

The drug enforcement agency says the purity of heroin found in Virginia is typically higher than usual—making it more deadly.

"They tend not to know how to gauge the strength and they usually take more than they need to," said Patrick McConnel, who oversees Treatment for Youth Services Administration Alcohol and Drug Services.

There are no easy answers here, to be sure, and I don’t claim any monopoly on the solutions to youth drug abuse. But I guarantee you that the problem isn’t our failure to collect more urine from young people. As long as the most dangerous substances continue to be manufactured, distributed, and controlled by criminals, the face of our drug problem will remain the same.