Man jailed for months for drugs that were actually vitamins

Burrell insisted all along that the powder was actually vitamins

(Image credit: iStock)

published 17 February 2015

A Minnesota man named Joseph Burrell was jailed from November to February when a field drug test indicated that a bag of powder police found in his car was an amphetamine. He was charged with two felonies.

After another round of testing in the lab, however, the powder was revealed to be what Burrell had claimed all along: vitamins. Burrell had been encouraged to plead guilty before he was released, but he said he "couldn't plead guilty [to possessing] something I knew wasn't a drug. They set my bail at $250,000 for vitamins."

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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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