America’s fixation on drugs is beyond psychotic. God forbid someone actually enjoys their shitty life a little bit. When does congress get its random drug tests? Oh, that’s right, the rules don’t apply there…
This is literally a bit in Seinfeld, except its a bagel and Elaine doesn’t get to go on her work trip. Guess our collective memory is very very very short.
My dad had a story similar to this from when he worked at a bank. Someone brought in poppyseed muffins for the office, the same morning that the office got randomly selected for drug tests. The higher-ups were really confused when the entire office tested positive for opiates.
Someone knew there was a drug test and flooded the office with Poppy so they wouldn’t get caught.
Galaxy brain move.
I remember at one place I worked the boss was really dead against the drug test and argued against them saying they were unnecessary since there was no evidence of drug taking.
Guess who calmed down when it turned out management weren’t required to take the tests. Yep. Fortunately his whole spiel did delay things about 4 days, so it was still beneficial to us.
That would be pretty genius/because even if they were positive for something else (not opiates) management would still be like “This whole batch of tests is totally scuffed, we can’t use it.”
Might’ve been the muffin or it might’ve been the Fentanyl Friday team building exercise. We’ll never know!
I do love Meth Mondays.
I think Weed Wednesday is the perfect mid week pick me up.
Everyone loves the energy and productivity gains from weed.
How do you think civil engineers come up with the switchback interchange?
I also had a roommate fail to get a job over a poppyseed muffin.
I do think it’s kind of ridiculous that they apparently can’t tell the difference between poppy seeds and heroin. Seriously they can’t figure that out?
Heroin is made from opium poppy seeds, so, yeah, a residual small dose of heroin in your blood looks like the same opium from a serving of poppy seed muffins.
Why are they drug testing in the first place? Wtf?
Because if a pregnant woman is on something chemically addictive, the baby is too, and that’s important to know when delivering a baby.
OP might like to shit talk the US and try to find topics specifically to do so. But they are not wrong here.
You ought to understand liberal democracies don’t just routinely drug test their population without consent or at least clear indication of a crime and following a court order. There was a time where the US at least aspired to be in the liberal democracies club. That you guys defend this practice even on a left-leaning platform such as lemmy is seriously frightening.
Did you even read the article? She wasn’t tested without her consent. She just didn’t think the test would come back positive for opiates. The U.S. is no different from other countries: we don’t drug test people without their consent.
Jesus Christ, the caliber of commenter on this platform is seriously questionable.
The issue here is one of medical ethics.
It’s important for the doctors to know if the baby is going to suffer and possibly die from withdrawals after being born. The drug tests are important for knowing that.
However sharing that information with anyone else violates the trust with healthcare providers which results in significantly poorer health outcomes for everyone and pours gasoline on anti-intelluctual movements like antivax etc.
But why don’t they just ask the mother whether she took any medication or drugs she shouldn’t have? Given what happened in the article, the information provided by the mother would probably be more accurate anyway. Routinely not believing women is on brand, though. Again, we’re talking about women with absolutely no history of drug abuse. I’d seriously like to know how many women with no prior history of drug abuse start doing drugs just as they are getting pregnant to warrant routine testing.
Another problem with these kinds of tests is that they are not accurate enough. If you test urine samples routinely, the majority of your tests will be false positives. (Example: you test all pregnant women, 1% take drugs, the test is accurate 98% of the time. Congratulations, 2/3 of your tests are false positives.) That’s why you only do those tests if you have a suspicion based on other data and not just test everyone.
why don’t they just ask the mother whether she took any medication or drugs she shouldn’t have?
Because when you live in a police state where medical information is used to prosecute people then people have a strong incentive to lie which. Gets. People. Killed.
In the U.S. all healthcare professionals are “mandated reporters.” That means, if they find out about any form of child abuse while they’re on the job, they’re legally required to report it. Failing to do so can result in the loss of their professional license. Doing so is always considered an exception to confidentiality rights.
I suspect the hospital in question has a strict policy about reporting any pregnant mother who tests positive for drugs to CPS as a means of avoiding lawsuits. The problem is really with CPS systems in the U.S. They’re supposed to investigate reported instances of abuse and if it turns out there’s no cause for concern, close the case in short order; but CPS workers aren’t all of equal quality, and in my experience (I work in mental health), there’s a real problem with people who were abused as children becoming CPS workers and having a bias towards being overly suspicious of all parents. So, cases sometimes get dragged out, which ironically results in psychological harm to the children the CPS workers are supposed to be protecting.
Yes. Co-opting CPS a weapon in the “war on drugs” was a very intentional choice with extremely predictable outcomes.
While CPS is a good thing in concept it most often gets used as a weapon for class warfare. No angel investor is getting their kids taken away for getting busted snorting coke off a stripper.
Hospitals have no business testing for drugs without cause, which they do in the US per the article: “Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth.” Screening people routinely for drugs is some police state shit.
You’re right, it doesn’t say that she didn’t consent. It also doesn’t say she did either, the article simply doesn’t address it.
However, I just cannot imagine a scenario, where someone would be consenting to a drug test without coercion, can you? Why would she? If you didn’t take drugs, there’s no benefit. If you did take drugs and you want the doctors to know, tell them. If you took drugs and you don’t want the doctors to know, you don’t consent. And that doesn’t even take into account false positives. I don’t see any conceivable reason why anyone would subject themselves to a drug test where no possible outcome would be positive for you. So, please enlighten me, how are these completely voluntary drug tests with zero benefit to the test subject so common?
Add to that, that these tests are not good enough for random testing. You have too many false positives, so you must have additional indicators of drug use to even consider them from a purely scientific perspective.
Having a baby is a cause for drug testing though.
Please explain?
And you think this is normal? This is police state shit. I’m so glad I don’t live in that horrible country.
Oh, I remember you. You like baiting people into arguments and shit-talking America. LOL. Get some therapy, man. Rage-baiting online is a pathetic way to deal with your feelings.
I don’t know about their rage-baiting but it’s super easy to shit talk the US and, considering how much damage they do to everyone else, is pretty understandable.
It would be if the above post was about something related to bad actions by the U.S., but it’s not. People talking shit about America here are just using this post as a way to vent their anger about other issues, which is childish.
And before anyone accuses me of anything, I’m no Trump supporter and I understand why people are angry at America right now. Still, that’s no reason to disparage the entire country as a “shithole.”
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Ah, another baiter. You should get some therapy too. When another country’s politics piss you off this much, and you resort to venting your rage online, that’s a pretty good sign you have some unaddressed issues going on in your life. It’s not uncommon for people to avoid dealing with their real problems by becoming willfully preoccupied with more trivial issues that don’t really affect them, like politics.
Thinking this is normal is pathetic. Thinking America is great right now is also pathetic. Maybe when they start rounding your friends up you will finally see the light. Who am I kidding you don’t have any friends.
Yep. Drug screen popped for heroin. Happens all the time. You’d think they would have figured out a way around it by now in the screening.
But it’s only the poor that have to take drug tests. So there’s no incentive to not ruin their lives.
Fresh out of high school I got a job working in the same grocery store as my then girlfriend (now wife), i had to take a drug test to finish the hiring process. I stopped at the grocery store to grab the paperwork and as I walked past the bakery they had fresh poppy seed bagels, my absolute favorite. I grabbed one and then went the next morning for my drug test, failed for opiates.
Should have said, yeah but they’re your opioids.
You should get bonus points for supporting the business drug dealing operation.
There is a way around it. Check again after 72h.
How long does it take for normal opiates to pass through? Because if they’re the same it doesn’t really indicate that it was from Poppy seeds.
If a opiate addict went clean for 72 hours for a drug test they would be in very bad shape by the time they get tested again. It would be completely obvious that they are in withdrawal. They would be very anxious, shivering, vomiting, and shitting.
Retesting after 72 hours is a pretty good indicator that someone isn’t using so long as you also observe physical symptoms.
Plus failing a drug test is an automatic disqualification from future employment. Nobody is going to give you multiple chances to pass.
I stayed up all night studying for this drug test! You gotta give me a 2nd try!
That’s why you don’t tell them they tested positive the first time. You can also likely tell by the levels in their system.
Mmm that salad was good, let’s get another.
If you’re eating the salad more than once a week you’re a psychopath and I don’t want you working here anyway.
Plenty of jobs for non-poor have random drug testing as well, for instance some jobs that are DOT regulated in the US, like flight crew.
You misunderstand. To the people making these decisions, flight crews are “the poor”.
We’re all just filthy poors to them.
Ffs there was a Seinfeld episode on this issue. 30 years later and we have nothing better?!
Yep. Authorities have basically just refused to admit how unreliable drug tests are, no matter how many times it’s proven
It’s standard war on drugs tactics… They don’t care how many people they hurt, gotta keep that slave prisoner population up
The drug war is and has always been primarily a class war.
Many such cases
There was a MythBusters episode too!
When I was a teenager, I found out that some of the packs of poppy seeds at grocery stores had seeds that were shinier and oilier than the other grey/blue/dusty ones. And they sat in clumps, not loose seeds. Turns out there was a lot of opium on those.
Good times were had, for about 2 weeks, followed by ~10 years of bad times.
Why are they drug testing women during childbirth? What kind of fucked up shit is that?
Started to become common during the moral panic around drugs in the 80s and 90s here in the US. I don’t know how it’s legal but this country is very backwards.
Pointing out that a person has taken an illegal drug at some point is one of the top dehumanization tools of conservatives. It is a very potent catalyst when combined with non-whiteness. It has a rich history going back at least to the nixon days.
It has a rich history going back at least to the nixon days.
Before that… At least goes back to the “Reefer Madness” days
Oh yeah, and of course the underlying bigotry and tribalism goes back like all the way.
Like half the conservatives ik be sniffing their keys in the bathroom
Well sure. The Only Moral Addiction Is My Addiction, so to speak.
How common are psychedelics in the military? Some friends woul have me think its insanely common but I only know from sources outside myself in that case. Just be downing shrooms and/or acid since it’s not on drug tests.
Its…decently common. When I was at huachuca shrooms and acid would go around, there’d be a shakedown every six months at the TRADOC soldiers’ barracks . For long missions it was incredibly easy to run into Ritalin and such. No one I knew did anything like coke or heroin.
They should - but only for medical reasons kept confidential. It’s important info for the doctor for the health of the kid. But not the cops.
Honestly I think it would be helpful to know if the baby might go into withdrawal but the positive test would be more of a flag to do a few rounds of neonatal abstinence scoring at set intervals after birth. I don’t see why you’d need to call CPS if the baby doesn’t significantly withdraw, since that’s the actual harm that would be done to the baby. If their NAS values are negligible obviously either the test was a false positive or mom wasn’t doing enough to actually put the baby at risk.
In some states, testing and then notifying CPS of positives is required by law. The healthcare staff hate it as much as the patients, because it does more harm than good.
Drug testing all pregnant women sounds so f*** up.
There have even been cases where they have given women pain meds before the test, then called CPS when she tested positive for those same pain meds.
According to this LA Times article, they weren’t testing everyone; they tested this woman because she skipped her prenatal visits. She did that because she lived with people who were at high risk from COVID-19. It also says she provided a urine sample voluntarily, but wasn’t told it was for drug testing.
It does seem reasonable to me that if a hospital had good reason to believe a woman was using opioids while pregnant, they would get child protective services involved. It does not seem to me that missing some appointments with as good an explanation as she gave here should be grounds to perform a drug test without the patient’s consent. Child protective services also shouldn’t be relying on a test with such poor specificity.
The problem is a shitty adjudication process with legal stakes that demand a more formal, judicial process. They blindside the accused without informed opportunity to competently defend themselves, review evidence, contest claims. The accused needs to understand the consequences at play & know when they’ll need a competent advocate or lawyer before it’s too late.
Sure, I believe society muat tke care of risky cases, probably tgis woman got really unlucky.
Anything to punish pregnant women.
More reason for women to avoid getting pregnant all together.
Probably she got unlucky, but the situation gives a bit of Handmade’s tale vibe.
Just got a box of poppy seed almond muffins from Costco. Guess my whole family, kids included, would test positive for both heroin and cyanide.
Absolutely horrible but they should absolutely warn people about foods that can make them false positive before any drug tests.
Or maybe we should stop drug testing people and exit the fascist fucking police state.
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That is such an American take. In my country there are three professions in which the employer can mandate a drugtest: train operator, pilots and captains. Everybody else is in their legal right to (and should) deny a drugtest. What you do in your spare time is none of your employers business.
Commercial truck drivers absolutely should be on that list as should anyone in an armed guard position.
Wait, bus drivers don’t get drug tested?
Nope. By law only employees within the three professions I described above have to comply when asked to take a drugs test. No other profession can be forced to take one.
That’s not to say that a bus driver driving irratically will never be tested - the police can still mandate a drugs test when suspected of DUI and you’d have to comply.
Are you insane? This whole thread is insane. The fact that you are OK with this makes this insane.
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Was this woman operating heavy machinery immediately after giving birth?
The factor in common is public safety. In the case of giving birth there is a new extremely vulnerable member of the public. It’s at least reasonable that the hospital needs to know
If the baby was born with obvious signs of drug use by the mother then you might have a case. But drug testing every single woman who gives birth is excessive and fascist.
If hospitals are doing this, women are going to stop trusting them to deliver their babies and start giving birth at home with the aid of a midwife instead.
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Driving, taking school kids on a trip, surgeries, Mars mission, secret weapon testing, etc.
She had a salad, an “everything” salad. Poppy seeds are just a minor everyday ingredient and it would to just not even think of them. Even knowing. Even being warned.
Warning is not enough.
No, the contrary: everyone should increase false positives to render these tests worthless & make laughingstocks of contemptible processes depending on them.
This exact false positive has been known about for decades. It was in a Seinfeld episode.
It’s like how I just read that 300+ people were arrested at a protest (of I think 500). Either way, when is it that just everyone in town is arrested?
That’s when the share values of private prison companies go to the moon.
Pregnant people don’t have the same rights as everybody else and it’s not just abortion. Reactionaries need to control what they don’t understand and absurdity is inevitable outcome.
just stop having kids
problems all over resolved
That’s exactly what’s happening. Birthrate dropping everywhere.
obviously not everyone has gotten the memo yet
It’s birthrates dropping below replacement rates, not a re-enactment of Children of Men.
But even in Africa, the birthrates are dropping. The biggest exception at the moment is Israel.
if the early indication of plastics impact on hormones is right children of men isnt so far off
This is how we lose to retarded conservatives and have Trump corruption again
you can leave the retards out of it ^_^
They voted to end democracy, they are retarded as fuck
voted end democracy
i get it, still sounds funny. I’d also remove the r-slur from your vocabulary 🤗
I’m not protecting conservatives for being mentally retarded.
The neurodivergents catching strays but aite
Anyone who listened to the 50 minute podcast can tell us whether she fought the decision and what the outcome was? Written article had no closure. Must have closure!
It was shitty of them not to link to the proper story with transcript. Seems a link was hidden away in the share button of the podcast player.
There was a guy who was jailed at Dubai Airport because he had eaten a poppy-seed bagel at Heathrow some 8 hours earlier.
How does that even happen? They do drug tests in airports now?
Meanwhile foster services took a baby away from a good family I know who wanted to adopt it. They gave it back to the drug addicted mother. A month later the mother ended up strung out and back in jail, and they wanted the foster family to take the baby in again.
I suspect the poppy seed story is an outlier.
addiction in the family is a no win scenario. such difficult times for all of you, sorry. some people really do get clean but addiction is a chronic condition
Cool anecdote.
