In 2010, Pennsylvania mother Elizabeth Mort had her newborn taken into protective custody after testing positive for opiates in a routine hospital test. The cause? A single poppy seed bagel.
Fast forward to July 2013, and Mort’s story is splashed across the media after Lawrence County’s child welfare agency and Jameson Hospital agreed to settle the suit filed on Mort’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (1). According to the lawsuit, the federal standard for opiates is 2000 ng/ml but Jameson Hospital, which has since changed its policies, alerted authorities after finding 300 ng/ml.
But this story is not so unusual. Popular myth debunking website Snopes (2) lists four cases of unfair dismissal involving the dreaded poppy seed. These – and the subsequent law suits – perhaps prompted the change in threshold introduced in 1998 (3): “[DHHS] amendments raised the initial and confirmatory test opiate thresholds from 300 [ng/ml] to 2000 ng/ml. The DHHS amendments also established a new requirement to test for 6-acetylmorphine (6-AM), a metabolite that comes only from heroin, using a 10 ng/ml confirmatory level, for specimens that have tested positive for morphine on the confirmatory test at the 2000 ng/ml level.” Quite why the hospital chose to report 300 ng/ml as a positive result two years after the law had been changed is unclear, but such a high-profile false-positive case certainly gives pause for thought: are there other serious miscarriages of justice out there?
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