Tag: drug testing

Ohio Senate Passes Marijuana DUI Bill Aimed At Protecting Drivers Who Aren’t High Behind The Wheel From Prosecution

The Ohio Senate unanimously passed legislation last week to overhaul the way that prosecutors must prove whether a person was driving under the influence of marijuana.

Ohio, like most the rest of the nation, has liberalized its marijuana laws over the past decade, now allowing recreational and medical use of the drug in a variety of forms.

This has posed a tricky challenge of setting a legal standard that prohibits driving while under the influence of marijuana, while not ensnaring people who are sober on the road but have used the drug in the past few days.

And unlike with alcohol’s well established limit of .08 percent of blood alcohol content as the legal threshold for impaired driving, the science around cannabis concentration in the blood is far murkier. Some people with high concentrations wouldn’t exhibit behavioral signs of impairment, while some people with low concentrations would, studies show.

“The current law allows for the conviction of innocent people, 100 percent straight out,” said Tim Huey in an interview, who lobbied for the bill on behalf of fellow DUI defense attorneys.

What the bill would do for drivers of accused of being high

Senate Bill 55, if agreed to by the Ohio House and the governor, would bring two big changes for people accused of driving while high. For one, it ends prosecutors’ current ability to convict drivers for driving under the influence based solely on the presence of marijuana “metabolites” in a person’s system.

Metabolites are the non-psychoactive byproduct of marijuana produced as the body breaks down (metabolizes) marijuana. Those metabolites can linger in a person’s system as long as 30 days after use, according to researchers and defense attorneys who support the bill.

Instead, police and prosecutors must show the presence of Delta 9-THC, the active ingredient that produces the high sensation.

The legislation also gives people accused of driving while high an opportunity to rebut the evidence against them if a comparatively lower concentration of marijuana is detected in their systems. That’s opposed to the “per se” system in current law, where a positive drug test almost guarantees a conviction.

“Basically right now we’re testing inactive metabolites, mostly through urine, and it’s really not accurate,” said Sen. Nathan Manning, a Lorain County Republican and former prosecutor who has pushed the legal change for years. “The inactive metabolites don’t show impairment, it just shows whether or not you used it [in the past].”

Several sources described the legal thresholds set in the legislation as the product of more art than science, and a compromise between prosecutors and defense attorneys who lobbied the bill.

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Military To Start Testing Service Members For The Psychedelic Psilocin, Memo Shows

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is expanding the list of drugs that military service members will be tested for to include the psychedelic compound psilocin, one of the two main components of psilocybin mushrooms.

In a memo obtained by Marijuana Moment, a DOD employee performing the duties of the deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness advised military leadership that psilocin will be added to the department’s Drug Demand Reduction Program drug testing panel effective October 1.

The memo, dated August 18, states that the policy change being made due to “the risk of impairment and subsequent deterioration of security, military fitness, readiness, good order and discipline.”

“Drug abuse by Service members is a safety and readiness issue, and the Department must adapt our detection and deterrence program to address new and emerging drug threats,” Dr. Merlynn Carson wrote.

The DOD official said that attachments to the memo lay out “cutoff concentrations” for a positive psilocin test and other drugs in the testing panel.

Marijuana Moment reached out to DOD for copies of those attachments, but representatives were not able to immediately provide the documents.

“The Department of Defense maintains a zero-tolerance policy prohibiting drug use, and we remain committed to continually expanding drug testing capabilities and enhancing our education and prevention efforts by providing effective information on drug misuse, including the use of Psilocin,” an official told Marijuana Moment in an email.

The memo says that the “first priority” for psilocin testing under the revised drug panel “will be given to specimens collected under the auspices of probable cause, consent, or command.”

“In proportion to laboratory capabilities and capacity, second priority will be given to special testing requests for other collection modes, such as routine inspection-based collections, and specimens may also be randomly tested for psilocin,” it says.

At the same time that DOD has moved to test for psilocin, it’s also carrying out a congressional mandated psychedelic therapy pilot program for active duty service members and veterans. A more recent spending bill covering DOD would require a “progress report” on that initiative.

This latest memo also comes about two months after a DOD contractor sued the federal government, alleging that questions about his past marijuana use during a security clearance process violated his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

While the latest DOD policy update concerned a psychedelic compound, questions about federal workers testing positive for marijuana have also ballooned in recent years, as more individual states have legalized the drug.

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Missouri Officials Will Begin Unannounced Marijuana Dispensary Visits For New Product Testing Initiative Next Month

State cannabis regulators will begin their first attempt next month to double check the work of licensed testing labs tasked with ensuring the safety of Missouri marijuana products.

Starting July 1, staff with the Division of Cannabis Regulation will arrive unannounced at dispensaries and collect about 50 products a month off the shelves. They’ll take them to the Missouri State Public Health Reference Laboratory to be tested for things like mold, pesticides and a whole range of other things.

Ryan Bernard, the division’s testing and research unit manager, said the unannounced sampling has been in the works for a while as a way to add an extra level of compliance. The division, Bernard said, isn’t expecting to find problems.

“We won’t know until we see the data,” Bernard said. “I have full faith and confidence in our testing licensees that they’re testing according to rule as it’s been outlined.”

However, national testing lab experts told The Independent that Missouri’s regulators might be shocked at the results.

“Shelf testing has not gone well in any state that I know of, especially if it’s just starting,” said Josh Swider, vice chair of the cannabis working group for American Council of Independent Laboratories. “It will be very telling very fast.”

Swider pointed to a citation in Arizona in April of a cannabis lab, where the state found more than a dozen alleged “deficiencies” including problems with the lab’s potency testing and pesticide and microbial detection methods.

Swider called the levels of pesticides on the Arizona products “sickening.”

“But this is what you’re seeing around the country,” said Swider, co-founder and CEO of Infinite Chemical Analysis Labs in San Diego. “Regulators are starting to enforce. They’re realizing an issue that’s been systemic for a long time.”

Other common issue Missouri regulars might also find, he said, are inflated levels of THC on products.

Regulators previously talked about conducting a “round robin” testing, where the state’s certified testing labs would double check each other’s work under the state’s instruction. Amy Moore, director of the Division of Cannabis Regulation (DCR), told lawmakers in 2023 that this additional testing rule was “critical.”

“The challenges in regulating and relying on for-profit cannabis testing labs,” Moore told lawmakers at a 2023 committee hearing, “is one of the most discussed challenges in the national cannabis regulatory community.”

However, the state never ended up getting the process going for a variety of factors, Bernard said, so the unannounced samples will be the regulators first attempt at a testing backstop.

Lawmakers began allocating money for this kind of sampling to be tested at the state laboratory in the fiscal year that began on July 1, 2024 with $3.8 million. Most of it went unspent because the cannabis testing methods were “still in the process of being implemented,” according to state budget documents. Another $2.4 million was allocated for this fiscal year ending on June 30, and it’s unclear how much of it has been spent.

Bernard couldn’t speak on the budget for testing, he said, because the division and state lab budgets are “totally separate.”

“Our operating budget is DCR only,” he said. “State public health labs is theirs.”

The lab will receive another $2.4 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

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Mothers Are Losing Custody Over Sketchy Drug Tests

A Georgia mother claims that she lost custody of her newborn daughter due to faulty drug tests from a lab with a documented history of inaccurate results. When a drug court and her OB-GYN ran tests on Kristen Clark-Hassell, her results were clean. But the tests from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) came back positive, and so the government took her youngest child.

“They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming after the court hearing,” Clark-Hassell told the Savannah-based outlet The Current. “For her to just be ripped like that just cut a hole in our hearts.”

In a 2021 whistleblower complaint, a former lab director for Avertest—the company that processed Clark-Hassell’s drug tests—claimed that as many as 30 percent of the lab’s test results were inaccurate. She further alleged that “meeting deadlines for test results is more important to Avertest than accuracy” and that the company manipulated data and set arbitrary detection cutoffs, increasing false positives. Avertest settled the Justice Department lawsuit relating to these claims in 2024, paying a $1.3 million settlement.

Clark-Hassell’s legal battle began with a DFCS-ordered Avertest drug screening in 2020. According to documents obtained by The Current, that test was taken on August 5, and it came back positive. Then a test from her OB-GYN taken on August 11 was negative. In September, a court-ordered drug test came back negative, but the DFCS ordered another round of testing in October. That time, her urine sample came back clean, but her hair follicle test was positive—raising serious concerns about the reliability of the results. While it’s still possible that the sporadic positives Clark-Hassell experienced were the result of drug use, this exact circumstance is why accurate testing matters when deciding whether or not to take the drastic step of removing children from their parents’ care.

Clark-Hassell’s case is not unique. Last year, The Marshall Project published two investigations revealing that CPS removed children based on unreliable drug tests. Some mothers tested positive after consuming over-the-counter drugs or poppy seeds. In other cases, hospitals reported women for testing positive for drugs that were given to them during labor.

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Trucking Industry Says Positive Marijuana Tests And ‘Sometimes Outdated’ Federal Regulations Are Contributing To National Driver Shortage

A recent policy paper from a pair of companies in the trucking industry says the sector was short about 80,000 drivers last year—an issue it asserts was exacerbated by workers testing positive for marijuana under the federal Department of Transportation’s (DOT) strict, zero-tolerance drug policy.

“A significant number of otherwise qualified drivers fail pre-employment or random drug tests due to marijuana use,” says the new report. “These drivers are often unaware of the DOT’s strict zero-tolerance policy or mistakenly believe that legal marijuana use in their home state is acceptable under federal law.”

Titled “Cannabis, Compliance and Driver Retention,” the white paper was published by fleet management firm Fleetworthy in partnership with the trade publication FreightWaves.

As marijuana has “moved from a largely prohibited substance to a widely legalized and socially accepted drug,” it says, “these cultural and legal shifts create complex challenges for both carriers and drivers.”

Other obstacles it points to are what it calls “the widespread proliferation of marijuana and CBD products” and “rigid (sometimes outdated) DOT regulations.”

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Pennsylvania Lawmakers Push To Protect Medical Marijuana Patients In Child Custody Cases After Father Loses Rights Over THC Test

Pennsylvania lawmakers are taking action to clarify that a person’s status as a medical marijuana patient cannot be used against them in parental custody rulings in family court.

While state statue clearly stipulates that lawful use of medical cannabis “shall not by itself be considered by a court in a custody proceeding,” a father’s recent experience losing custody rights after testing positive for THC metabolites has exposed an apparent implementation issue.

After David Levi—a registered medical cannabis patient with severe arthritis—sought financial support from his daughter’s mother in family court, his use of marijuana became a determining factor, contrary to what’s prescribed under state law.

“By the time they were done with me, I became a drug user—not a prescribed user—and that’s my tagline” in the eyes of the court, Levi told Marijuana Moment. “And two days before my father died, I got an email, and it was that the judge had ordered to take away all of my rights as a father.”

“I went from 50-50 custody to not being able to drive my daughter, and I’m only allowed to have overnight visits with her every other week,” he said.

Sen. John Kane (D) learned about his constituent’s story and, last week, circulated a cosponsorship memo to build support for forthcoming legislation to both clarify the existing statute and also make it so a person’s medical cannabis patient status cannot be used to determine child custody or to justify a drug test in a custody case.

“To treat his pain without using addictive opioids, my constituent obtained a medical marijuana card and began using this medication to treat his arthritis,” Kane wrote. “Medical marijuana has allowed him to manage his pain, maintain his work, and remain an attentive father to his three-year-old daughter.”

“Despite following the guidelines set forth by Pennsylvania’s Medical Marijuana Act, the constituent found himself in a custody battle that has threatened his rights as a father and penalized him based on his status as a medical marijuana patient,” he said, adding that current statute “prohibits the lawful use of medical marijuana as a determinant of child custody.”

“However, in my constituent’s case, his use of medical marijuana was used against him to determine child custody,” the senator said. And to address the issue, he will be filing legislation to “amend Title 23 Section 5328 to prohibit the use of medical marijuana from being used to determine child custody or the sole reason to order a drug test in child custody cases.”

The text of the bill hasn’t been filed yet. But on the House side, a Republican lawmaker has since committed  to work on the issue as well, Levi said.

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Federal Official Downplays Criticism That Saliva-Based Marijuana Testing As Urine Alternative Would Spur Use By Truckers

Amid ongoing discussions about how to ensure drivers aren’t impaired by marijuana, a federal official recently pushed back on criticism that proposed implementation of saliva-based drug testing could incentivize more cannabis use by commercial truckers.

In comments to the publication Transit Topics, an unidentified official from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) responded to assertions from the CEO of a drug-testing company that oral fluid testing “means truckers who use cannabis will be able to do so with near impunity, as long as they avoid a drug test for a couple of days.”

The contention of the CEO—Ken Fichtler, of Gaize—was that the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) “shift to oral fluid testing will have serious consequences for the trucking industry” because saliva testing has a shorter detection window than typical urine-based testing. He said the tests detect use within the past “24 to 48 hours,” which is far shorter than the period of weeks when marijuana metabolites can be detected in urine.

DOT finalized the new testing policies in 2023 to allow oral saliva drug testing as an alternative to urine-based tests.

The SAMHSA official, granted anonymity by Transit Topics, disputed Fichtler’s claims—both on the test’s detection window itself and the implications of DOT’s revised testing policies for truckers’ marijuana use.

“In referenced journal articles, cannabis use can be detected via oral fluid testing for up to 72 hours,” the official said. “When a donor receives a request for collection, the donor will not know if the test will be an oral fluid or urine collection until they arrive at the collection facility for a federal agency.”

Not knowing whether to expect a saliva or urine test, in other words, would prevent the situation described by Fichtler of drivers simply stopping marijuana use a few days before a saliva-based test.

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Ending Drug Testing For Marijuana During Pregnancy ‘Improved Racial Parity’ Without Harming Babies, American Medical Association Study Says

A new federally funded study published by the American Medical Association finds that removing isolated marijuana use as a reason to order urine drug screenings during pregnancy “was associated with improved racial parity in testing and reporting” of test results to child protective services, “with no evidence of decreased identification of non prescribed, non cannabis substances” and “no significant association between the intervention and any measured neonatal outcomes.”

The report, published on Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, notes that urine drug screenings are often used during pregnancy to guide prenatal care. And some states require that positive results for federally illegal substances be reported to child protective services.

Authors from Washington University in St. Louis, however, suggest that the harms of that practice sometimes outweigh the benefits. Eliminating marijuana as a reason to order drug screening, they wrote, better protects families and promotes parity by “reduc[ing] racial bias in urine drug screening and reporting to child protective services without impacting the identification of clinically meaningful substance use.”

The report notes that “Black patients are significantly more likely than their White counterparts to undergo peripartum urine drug screening (UDS) and subsequent reporting to child protective services (CPS).”

Parents’ fear of a CPS report and possible loss of custody of a newborn child can get in the way of needed care, which can further exacerbate racial disparities in health.

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Hospitals Are Giving Pregnant Women Drugs, Then Reporting Them to CPS When They Test Positive

According to a new investigation from The Marshall Project, hospitals are giving women drugs during labor and then reporting them to child welfare services when they later test positive for those same drugs. These cases are one of the more maddening side effects of an out-of-control drug war combined with strict mandatory reporting laws. 

“Hospital drug testing of pregnant women, which began in the 1980s and spread rapidly during the opioid epidemic, was intended in part to help identify babies who might experience withdrawal symptoms and need extra medical care,” writes The Marshall Project reporter Shoshana Walter. “Federal law requires hospitals to alert child welfare agencies anytime such babies are born.” 

The problem is that these pee-in-a-cup tests are frequently inaccurate and vulnerable to false positives. One 2022 study cited by Walter found that 91 percent of women given fentanyl in their epidurals tested positive for it later. Making matters worse, in several cases reviewed by Walter, a simple lack of due diligence played a major role. In these cases, “doctors and social workers did not review patient medications to find the cause of a positive test. In others, providers suspected a medication they prescribed could be the culprit, but reported patients to authorities anyway,” Walter writes. 

One woman Walter spoke to was reported to child welfare services soon after she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She had tested positive for benzodiazepine—the same drug she was given before her emergency C-section. Another woman was given morphine to ease her pain during childbirth and was reported to child welfare services after her baby’s first bowel movement tested positive for opiates—even though the morphine was noted in her medical records and a drug test she took shortly before she went into labor showed no drugs in her system. After another woman tested positive for meth, her four children—including a newborn—were taken from her and kept in first care for 11 days. They weren’t returned until another drug test showed that the positive test was triggered by a heartburn medication she had been given at the hospital. 

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New York City’s Push to Ban Mail at Rikers Was Based on Drug Test Kits With an 85 Percent Error Rate

In 2022, former New York City Department of Corrections Commissioner Louis Molina testified before the city council about the flood of fentanyl coming into Rikers Island, the city’s infamous jail complex.

“How does fentanyl get into our jails?” he asked. “The short answer is that most of it enters in letters and packages laced with fentanyl, literally soaked in the drug, and mailed to people in custody.”

To illustrate the problem, Molina had a powerful prop: A child’s drawing of a reindeer that had been mailed to a Rikers Island inmate and tested positive for fentanyl. It was because of letters like this, Molina explained, that his department was proposing ending delivery of physical letters to jail inmates and instead sending them scanned and digitized copies.

There was only one problem: The field test used on that reindeer drawing wasn’t reliable, and a drug lab would later invalidate the results. Rudolph was clean.

In fact, a report released Wednesday by the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) found that, when it sent 71 pieces of mail that tested presumptive positive for fentanyl to a drug lab for verification, 85 percent of the items came back negative, including the reindeer drawing.

The DOI concluded that “field tests are not reliable, particularly with respect to the identification of fentanyl in items such as books, clothing, greeting cards and other materials sent through the mail.”

The basis for the DOC’s proposed policy ending physical mail delivery to inmates was a falsehood, and not a particularly good one. The problems with these drug field tests are well known: They’ve resulted in hundreds of documented cases of wrongful arrests around the country, and several state prison systems, including New York’s, have suspended their use.

The test kits use instant color reactions to indicate the presence of certain compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known licit substances. Over the years, police officers have arrested and jailed innocent people after drug field kits returned presumptive positive results on bird poop, donut glaze, cotton candy, and sand from inside a stress ball. 

A study published earlier this year by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania estimated that these tests may result in up to 30,000 wrongful arrests a year.

The DOI says reliance on these field tests led officials to incorrectly focus on mail instead of other, more obvious, vectors for contraband.

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