Woman jailed for a month when police confuse SpaghettiOs with meth
Police in Georgia jailed a woman named Ashley Huff for a total of one month when they discovered a dirty spoon in her possession. It was during a routine traffic stop that cops noticed the spoon, which had SpaghettiO residue on it — residue the police officer claims tested positive for methamphetamine in a field kit.
Huff was arrested and jailed, though charges were eventually dropped when further testing revealed there was no evidence of meth on the dirty spoon. While in jail, Huff missed her child's birthday and lost her job.
The National Drug Policy Alliance reports that more than 1.6 million people are "arrested, prosecuted and incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision and/or deported each year for a drug law violation," a major contributing factor to the United States having the largest prison population in the world.
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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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