“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.

  • Samvega
    20·
    7 days ago

    Gonna call “hinky” on this.

    Thanks for defending a human world which has been purposefully designed to harm other humans.

    As the article states:

    The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed.

    These are people about whom you do not really care, I suppose, so wishful thinking about how ‘isn’t the world great?’ is more important than compassion for other living beings, in this circumstance.