In 2022, former New York City Department of Corrections Commissioner Luis Molina testified before the City Council about the massive influx of fentanyl at Rikers Island, the city’s notorious prison facility.
“How does fentanyl get into prison?” he asked. “Simply put, most of it is in letters and packages laced with fentanyl, literally soaked in the drug, and mailed to people in custody.”
To illustrate this issue, Molina has a powerful prop. It was a drawing of a reindeer that was mailed to a Rikers Island inmate and drawn by a child who had tested positive for fentanyl. Molina said letters like this led his department to propose End physical letter delivery Send scanned and digitized copies to prison inmates on their behalf.
There was just one problem. The field tests used for the reindeer painting were unreliable and the results were later invalidated by the Pharmaceutical Research Institute. Rudolph was beautiful.
actual, report A report released Wednesday by the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) found that 71 pieces of mail that were presumed positive for fentanyl were sent to a pharmaceutical lab for testing, and 85% of them, including pictures of reindeer, were sent to pharmaceutical labs for testing. It turned out that the mail was returned negative.
The DOI concluded that “on-site testing is unreliable, especially when it comes to identifying fentanyl in books, clothing, greeting cards, and other items sent by mail.”
Basics of DOC proposed policy Ending physical mail delivery to prisoners was false and not particularly good. The problems with these drug field trials are well known. As a result, hundreds of false arrests have been documented across the country, and several state prisons, including New York, have ceased using them.
This test kit uses an instant color reaction to indicate the presence of specific compounds found in illegal drugs, but those same compounds are also found in dozens of known legal substances. For years, police officers have arrested and jailed innocent people after drug scene kits returned presumptive positive results. bird droppings, donut glaze, cotton candyand sand in stress ball.
A study published earlier this year by the University of Pennsylvania’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice Estimation These tests could result in up to 30,000 illegal arrests a year.
DOI says that reliance on these field tests mistakenly led authorities to focus on the mail rather than other, more obvious vectors of contraband.
“DOI’s investigation shows that contraband enters DOC facilities through means including DOC personnel, and DOC is strengthening controls on DOI’s previous recommendations, particularly regarding the smuggling of contraband by personnel, thereby addressing the vulnerability of this sector.” “We found that there was a failure to fully implement recommendations aimed at restricting sexual activity,” the report said. Say.
The New York City Department of Corrections did not immediately comment on whether it would continue to use field kits and digitized mail, but said in a statement: “Field tests are tools used to quickly assess potential threats, and while they are not perfect, they play an important role in our safety protocols. We will continue to review and refine our testing process to ensure the highest standards of safety for everyone involved.”
However, prisons and jails do not use these field tests as a first step to identifying potential drugs. These are usually the only steps. As the DOI report notes, field trials are “not subject to routine confirmatory clinical testing.”
The Supreme Court ruled that inmates have no constitutional right to require drug tests to be sent to an outside lab for verification, and that prisons are free to punish inmates based on the results. . reason reported Despite the manufacturer’s warning that the results are preliminary, the study is based on unverified field tests on how federal inmates are exposed to solitary confinement and other punishments. There is.
In 2020, the New York state prison system Paused Use of drug testing kits manufactured by Sirchie due to reliability concerns. investigation It was later revealed 2,000 state prisoners were unfairly punished with solitary confinement, canceled parole hearings, and loss of visitation rights due to field tests that were later invalidated by drug labs.
And in 2021, a Massachusetts judge ordered The state prison has called for a halt to the use of Sirsi’s test kits for synthetic cannabinoids, saying they are “highly unreliable” and “only marginally better than flipping a coin.” This injunction is class action lawsuit The lawsuit alleges that more than a dozen Massachusetts attorneys say they were wrongly accused of sending drugs to incarcerated clients and placed in solitary confinement for receiving legitimate legal mail. It was received and submitted.
Another class action lawsuit is submitted Last year, he challenged the state prison system in Washington for punishing inmates based on unverified field test results.
Rikers Island in New York City also used test kits from Sirchie, but switched to a different brand, DetectaChem, last year.
However, the issue has nothing to do with branding. That means the test won’t give the user a definitive result about the presence of the drug in the first place. In 2018, a California judge ruled that if a color test identifies chocolate as presumptive positive for heroin, and you accept the logic that the test can identify heroin, then “that’s the presumptive positive for chocolate. That may be true,” he said.
Cirsier notes that there is a clear warning in that message. Website: “All test results must be confirmed by an approved laboratory! The results of this test are estimates only. NARK® only tests for the possible presence of specific compounds. Reactions can occur in both, and such compounds are found in both legal and illegal products.
When Molina testified in 2022 that “books are meant to be read, not smeared with fentanyl,” he was probably more right than he thought.
