By the standards of the rest of Louisiana, New Orleans is a fairly liberal place. But judges in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court may be punishing people \u2014 with fines, increased bonds or even jail time \u2014 based on a flawed drug testing program, according to a new report by a local watchdog group.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0report<\/a>, released this month by\u00a0Court Watch NOLA<\/a>, found that the parish drug-testing lab does not follow \u201cbest practices,\u201d failing to adequately confirm results and avoid false positives. Yet the court\u2019s reliance on these dubious tests \u201cappears to be a common occurrence.\u201d Court Watch charged that sanctions meted out by judges based on positive results are \u201cinappropriate, inconsistent, and inequitable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the reason why we ask that judges really consider, in an individual capacity, whether drug testing is really meeting the needs that they feel are a priority in individual cases,\u201d Court Watch director Simone Levine said in an interview with\u00a0The Lens<\/a>, an area investigative journal. \u201cWhat are those needs? Is it making us safer to drug test people?\u201d<\/p>\n While the report does not specify if any particular substances were returning more false positives than others, Louisiana courts do test for cannabis use when drug testing.<\/p>\n National standards call for court-ordered drug tests to be carried out in two steps \u2014 initial screening and confirmation.\u00a0But in New Orleans, the court\u2019s lab does not confirm initial positive results with a second test using an alternative method. Nationally, confirmation tests are typically done with a process known as gas or liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS\/MS). But according to Court Watch, \u201cthe Lab lacks any equipment capable of performing definitive drug tests such as LC-MS\/MS and there is no indication that drug testing samples are sent off-site to confirm presumptively positive test-results.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, the lab\u2019s own policy manual describes the confirmation step as re-testing the same sample, with the same method \u2014 contrary to the accepted norm.<\/p>\n In a review of 11 cases in which defendants were held in contempt for a positive test result, Court Watch found nine in which there was no record of any confirmation test at all. In the remaining two cases, records showed the lab re-tested using a second sample, which the report describes as \u201ccontrary to scientific best practices, which require confirmation using a different testing method on the same sample.\u201d<\/p>\n Court Watch found at least 77 cases in which defendants were held in contempt and sanctioned for a positive drug test in 2018. Of these, 59 spent time behind bars as a result, for an average of 18 days.<\/p>\n The investigation comes at a somewhat ironic time, with legislation related to the drug testing issue under review by lawmakers in the statehouse in Baton Rouge.<\/p>\n The House Transportation Committee last week advanced a bill that would mandate drug testing in any road incident involving serious bodily injury or death. Louisiana\u2019s current law allows for post-accident drug testing only when there is an on-site fatality, as Shreveport\u2019s\u00a0KTAL<\/a>\u00a0explains. The proposed bill would expand the existing law. It is dubbed \u201cKatie Bug\u2019s Law,\u201d after 4-year-old Katie Grantham of Bossier Parish, who was killed by a motorist in 2017. Katie\u2019s mother, Morgan Grantham, suspected the motorist was impaired by drugs, but he was not tested by police because Katie did not die at the scene.<\/p>\n The issue of road carnage is of course an extremely pressing one. But if drug testing standards are as poor in the rest of the state as they appear to be in Orleans Parish, that is certainly a question that needs to be addressed before any expansion of such testing is instated.\u00a0<\/p>\n Furthermore, it is to be assumed that cannabis is to be included in such testing \u2014 despite the fact that the entire question of \u201cmarijuana-impaired driving\u201d is widely misunderstood.\u00a0Traces of THC stay in the system for weeks after the effects of cannabis have worn off. And cannabis does not impair driving nearly as dramatically or uniformly as alcohol. A\u00a0recent study<\/a>\u00a0found that, contrary to prohibitionist assumptions, cannabis legalization has not been linked to an increase in traffic deaths.<\/p>\n It also doesn\u2019t look like the pressure on cannabis is going to be lifted in Louisiana any time soon. On May 29, two cannabis legalization bills \u2014 HB509 and HB564 \u2014 were defeated in committee. Too predictably, Democrats voted for, and Republicans against. House Bill 509 would have allowed adult possession of up to one ounce of cannabis, and instructed the state\u00a0Department of Agriculture & Forestry\u00a0and the\u00a0Board of Pharmacy\u00a0to issue licenses for production and sale. House Bill 564 was essentially similar, but would have given authority for retail licenses to the\u00a0Office of Alcohol & Tobacco Control.<\/p>\n While Louisiana sheriffs and district attorneys spoke against the measures, among those speaking for them was Kevin Caldwell, founder and president of Commonsense NOLA. Even after their defeat, Caldwell struck an optimistic and determined tone. \u201cWe will eventually prevail,\u201d he told the\u00a0Big Easy<\/a>\u00a0news site.<\/p>\n There is little breathing room for cannabis in Louisiana outside of the both very limited and\u00a0unconscionably delayed<\/a>\u00a0medical program. The state continues to have some of the harshest cannabis laws in the country \u2014 although New Orleans and Baton Rouge have, at least, started to de-emphasize enforcement of these laws in local policing.<\/p>\n Legislation now pending on Capitol Hill\u00a0would rein in drug testing<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 protecting the jobs of federal employees who test positive for cannabis in states where such use is now legal. It looks like Louisiana residents will be very lucky if this is to be a concern for them any time soon.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0have you ever been drug tested?<\/p>\n The post \u2018False Positives\u2019 Drug Testing Scandal Emerges in New Orleans<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
By the standards of the rest of Louisiana, New Orleans is a fairly liberal place. But judges in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court may be punishing people \u2014 with fines, increased bonds or even jail time \u2014 based on a flawed drug testing program, according to a new report byContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,8739,484,1986,53,3267],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35811"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35811\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35812,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35811\/revisions\/35812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Jailed for False Positives?<\/h4>\n
Meanwhile, Use of Drug Tests Widens<\/h4>\n
Legalization Bid Killed in Louisiana<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: \u2018False Positives\u2019 Drug Testing Scandal Emerges in New Orleans<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"