{"id":1303,"date":"2008-05-06T16:30:41","date_gmt":"2008-05-06T21:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1303"},"modified":"2008-05-06T16:30:41","modified_gmt":"2008-05-06T21:30:41","slug":"the-false-positive-wasnt-the-drug-testit-was-the-police-exam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1303","title":{"rendered":"The False Positive Wasn’t The Drug Test…It Was The Police Exam…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you take vitamins? Did you ever travel with vitamins? Oh, well… if you take a lot of vitamins, and they’re not the kind that says "Joe’s Vitamins" on the side "the plain-looking vitamins" and you have a whole lot, and you don’t the whole big jumbo thing on the road, you take as many as you need – and they’re not marked. And the jar you put them in isn’t marked. If a policeman really wants to give you a hard time, he can hold you overnight while they check the vitamins. That’s why I travel with Flintstones vitamins!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

-George Carlin <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately…that’s not a plan that works anymore…\n<\/p>\n

\n

The pills? Pain relief. The arrest? That hurt.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

SARASOTA — When the police stopped him one night in Sarasota, Villis Sanders told officers that the small blue pills in his car were Aleve, an over-the-counter medicine for his aching wisdom teeth.<\/p>\n

A patrolman used a drug kit to verify what the pills were.<\/p>\n

The test said the tablets were amphetamines, Sanders was jailed and his car was impounded.<\/p>\n

But it turns out that the test was wrong. Prosecutors took the pills to a laboratory before Sanders’ trial and found out that they were Aleve, after all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In typical fashion, the DA’s office never bothered to tell Sanders that the charges were dropped because…well…he was innocent.  He found out when he went to court and they told him to go back home. \n<\/p>\n

\n

Experts say that "false positives" are rare, but when the police department tested additional pills — including an Aleve tablet provided by the Herald-Tribune — the results were the same: Aleve shows up as amphetamines.<\/p>\n

No one knows why the test keeps getting it wrong.<\/p>\n

The manufacturer said that officers might not have been properly trained, or that Aleve might contain a compound similar to one found in amphetamines.<\/p>\n

Officials from Bayer Health Care, which makes Aleve, did not immediately respond to questions.<\/p>\n

And Sarasota police officials questioned both the kits and the compounds in Aleve — but say that they did everything they could to figure out what Sanders was carrying that night.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well…not quite Everything<\/em>… <\/p>\n

\n

In this case, both of the tablets found in Sanders’ car were blue and oblong, and each was stamped with the word "Aleve."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m waiting for the day when I read a news story about a man who was arrested and jailed and had his car impounded for possession of a quarter pound of cocaine that turned out upon further examination back at the lab to be a Quarter Pounder With Cheese.  Well the test said it was cocaine so we arrested him…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you take vitamins? Did you ever travel with vitamins? Oh, well… if you take a lot of vitamins, and they’re not the kind that says "Joe’s Vitamins" on the side "the plain-looking vitamins" and you have a whole lot, and you don’t the whole big jumbo thing on the road, you take as many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[34,19],"class_list":["post-1303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-george-bushs-america","tag-the-jackass-chronicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}