In April of 2013, Elizabeth Mort, of Pennsylvania, ate a bagel that was made with poppy seeds. Then she went to the hospital and gave birth to a baby girl. The staff at Jameson Hospital in Lawrence County is lucky, because when I go into labor, I always stop at Taco Bell en route, and eat as many seven layer burritos as I can before arriving at the hospital; yet when they did their wonderful drug tests on Mort, with their wonderfully inflated prices for the insurance company to cover, they used a standard of 300 nanograms per milliliter as a guideline of THC, and of otherwise being a doper, rather than the federally accepted 2000 nanograms per milliliter. This allowed the residue from the poppyseed bagel to appear in the test results. Three days later, while Mort was at home with her new daughter, social services stormed her house and took her baby away. The hospital had telephoned social services with news of a positive drug test, with no mention of the comparison of the results of said drug test to federal standards, and had thus made a false report. While it only took five days for Mort to get her daughter back, it took three years to settle the lawsuit, which was finally settled this past week. The ACLU got involved on Mort's behalf.
Why would a child be taken from a parent over a lab result that was not even current information? Why would a child be taken from a parent over a violation of a prohibition law? After all, we do not routinely remove children from the homes of people who get cited for DWI. Why is marijuana so much more important? If there was no indication of fetal distress because of drugs, why did the hospital order a test for drugs? Why did the hospital order the test without the patient's knowledge? When the test came back flagged as a false positive, why didn't the hospital discuss it with the patient immediately? Was the hospital more interested in snagging a newborn and helping the state to sell it, rather then finding out if the patient had a substance abuse problem? These are all questions that anyone of either gender planning on becoming a parent should want answered before choosing an hospital for the birth.
The ACLU insisted that Jameson Hospital and Pennsylvania come into compliance and stop harassing families, but what about your state? It's clearly time to rethink the importance of family, legalize marijuana, (no, I am NOT a cannabis indulger) or do both.
