She ate a poppy seed salad just before giving birth. Then they took her baby away.
She ate a poppy seed salad just before giving birth. Then they took her baby away.
“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something, and it was wrong.”
Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.
Then she ate a salad from Costco.
Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.
If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.
For all those here saying that it can't happen, here's some info that says it can.
Poppy Seed Consumption May Be Associated with Codeine-Only Urine Drug Test Results
US Dept of Defense: Service Members Should Avoid Foods With Poppy Seeds
Urinary concentrations of morphine and codeine after consumption of poppy seeds
Poppy Seeds Signal Limitations of Urine Drug Testing Protocols
For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes.
"Except for you Marge. You tested positive for crack and PCP."
Permanently Deleted
Gonna call "hinky" on this.
Back when I had a job that required regular drug testing we WERE told to not eat poppy seeds. But my understanding is that, unless you have other digestive issues (not sure if a baby would count?), it is incredibly unlikely to test positive unless you are mainlining poppy seeds for weeks on end. Its similar to how getting a whiff of something dank isn't going to make you test positive but you should still avoid those scenarios.
The issue is that if you pissed hot you would immediately need a much more expensive (since you need a proper professional rather than someone who signed a form saying they won't pleasure themselves while watching you pee...) blood test. And, in the case of contractors, they would then need to deal with the union reps who would fight tooth and nail to ensure that blood test never happens and it is just a headache for everyone. And you can bet those reps always insisted people had just eaten a single poppy seed muffin. Same with the Super Important Parents of the nepo babies.
But yeah. It is fricking wild that it is immediate action without follow up. Especially when someone is going to be in the hospital for at least a day or two anyway.
Nice to see the western propaganda against poppy seeds still going strong. No wonder it's so damn hard to buy reasonably priced seeds in NA to bake one of these puppies https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Makowiec.jpg/440px-Makowiec.jpg
