The misguided war on drugs backfired in a big way for a 64-year-old Floridian and may cost the police department that arrested him dearly when it’s all over. Daniel Rushing had just dropped off a friend at a local hospital for a chemo session when he was pulled over for a minor traffic violation. The officer searched his vehicle and noticed some small flakes. That’s when things went terribly awry:
“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut,” he told the Sentinel. “They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'”
But two roadside drug tests came back positive for meth. Rushing, who is white, ended up spending 10 hours in jail and was released on a $2,500 bond. Prosecutors later dropped the case against him after another test determined the flakes were not an illegal drug.
It may come as a surprise to some that a seemingly impartial drug test could incriminate Rushing for eating a doughnut, but it’s actually quite common. Many of the cheapest — and therefore most popular — roadside tests are intrinsically flawed.
Rushing was jailed, strip-searched, and had to bond out before police discovered the error. He has said he will sue the department. But regardless of the outcome, the results from these kinds of tests have given and continue to give police cause for thousands and thousands of arrests every month. One would think, at the very least, that every single meth arrest or conviction resulting solely from this specific kind of testing kit would be thrown out.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for those results to be ruled inadmissible. Thanks to the war on drugs and the hysteria surrounding it, that will never happen. Which means thousands of innocent people could, at the very least, lose their jobs due to a random drug test, and others could languish in prison for years all because of flawed tests bought on the cheap—like the one that could have put Daniel Rushing away for years.