This man spent 3 days in jail because the cops thought cat litter was meth
A Texas man named Ross LeBeau spent three days in jail in December because law enforcement confused cat litter with methamphetamine and arrested him on drug charges. LeBeau had a bag of litter in his car which cops noticed during a routine traffic stop. The litter tested positive for meth in two field tests (false positives are an endemic problem with roadside test kits), and LeBeau was arrested.
Then, the Harris County Sheriff's Office sent out a press release boasting that the arrest "may have kept our children and loved ones free from being introduced to drugs." But, as a lab test later revealed, they actually only saved the children from kitty litter.
LeBeau's case was eventually dismissed and he is now attempting to clear his arrest record. "People have been calling me a kingpin or a drug lord," he said. "They thought they had the biggest bust in Harris County. This was the bust of the year for them."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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