A question about drugs, advice needed......

[alecia777]

Hello all, this is probably gooing to be a strange question. Years ago my ex and I allowed his son to stay with us, long story short he was addicted to drugs, we had Marchman acted him and the courts required him to attend outpatient drug treatment. We allowed him to live with us while he attended. Of course under the stipulation that he not use any drugs. He seemed to be doing okay for the first few weeks, then one night I was eating some pasta salad and I bit into something hard, I swallowed the first bit before I realized that something was very wrong. My throat and mouth were going numb. I spit out the remainder of the food and started freaking a bit. Honestly i thought my food was posioned!! Come to find out that my step-son had hid his drugs in my bowls. Since the bowl was white and I was tired I didn't even see it!! Mind you, this was crack cocaine!! My question is, would this count as using a drug? Since I did ingest it, although I did not ingest it on purpose. Just a little stressed...... Thank you all for taking the time to read this and to all the officers on here forr your duty!!! God Bless you all!!

[retdetsgt]

Count for what purpose? Medically, yes. For anything else, it was accidental.

[alecia777]

Thank you for the quick response, Retdetsgt. I feel foolish asking this but I think it is something I should tell the BI. Hopefully he doesn't think i am a complete ditz. I just would honestly never think of checking my bowls for drugs.

[Samuel]

If I was a BI, I might ask you why you didn't notice a foreign substance in your bowl at any point prior to eating and/or if you habitually divert your attention from tasks at hand or "miss" things that you "should" notice...

[alecia777]

Samule, yes I see your point. I really have no excuse.

[212david]

Did you file a police report about the incident?

[MikeG]

Thank you for the quick response, Retdetsgt. I feel foolish asking this but I think it is something I should tell the BI. Hopefully he doesn't think i am a complete ditz. I just would honestly never think of checking my bowls for drugs.

Not LEO, but I'd tell the BI because drug questions come up on the poly and I wouldn't want your reaction to the question to blow it up. I guarantee you this incident will be floating through your head when they ask it and a simple "No" won't fly. Qualifying or chaging your "No" will not be good juju for your chances. Let them change the question to "Other than the time when ....." because you told them ahead of time, you will be fine. This is the difference between completely honest and open vs. deciding what's relevant to be disclosed. As an aside not related to drugs, I've had people tell me it's a good idea to disclose things like sexual abuse to a BI and poly examiner because the poly sexual predator questions can be extremely stressful for victims. I have no idea if that's actually the case but it makes sense to me and it can't hurt to be honest. Knowing that you've done nothing wrong doesn't mean it's not stressful to discuss it.

I'm assuming you didn't follow up the cocaine spaghetti with heroin sauce and turn it into an Italian speedball? Also, now you can test it like they do on TV by rubbing it on your gums since you know what it feels like and can save the dept the presumptive test kits. j/k

When you found out what happened, did you call the police or file a report? If not, why not? Personally, if that had happened to me, I'd have called 911 for medical overdose reasons (how much crack did you swallow? Do you know? I wouldn't have trusted the son to tell me if the answer meant the difference between calling 911 or not). I would then call an attorney to figure out how to let police search (if they wanted to) for more drugs without putting you in legal jeopardy. Maybe even just talk to the police that respond and see if an off-duty or unused canine can search the house for you if the police know your situation and are comfortable you aren't a cocaine user/dealer. I would think being very cooperative with the search and treating it as an unknown overdose would give you a lot of legal cover especially if you are willing to cooperate with charging the kid but you never know. If it was recent, you might even consider it now. It's not a 911 thing but a k-9 unit may enjoy it as a training exercise or something.

As for Samuel's question, I'd respond I'm generally "Condition White" in my house (though with known drug user that might change.) Different answer if it was a bowl at the Mongolian BBQ outside the house and not bowls I routinely wash and put away myself in my own home. Just my 0.02.

[alecia777]

Mike G., No I did not call the police, Looking back now I should have. I kicked the step-son out. Believe me I was not thrilled with my ex's decision to move his son in with us, but we were trying to help him get his life back on track. The poly was exactly the reason this was concerning me. I would hate to fail because I was thinking of that incident. That is why I will definetly disclose it. And yes I agree it looks very bad, it happened a long time ago but I do remember that I had grabbed one of the "Show" bowls off the top shelf, all the regular ones were in the dishwasher. probably the reason he chose to hide it there, noone ever used them. Well except me I did go to the hospital, But the tests showed no drugs of any kind in my system so Idk, maybe the amount I swallowed was too small. All I can do is tell the truth and hope for the best.

[retdetsgt]

Tell the BI, certainly. But I wouldn't get too wrapped up about it if you have no other illegal drug ingestion. It just goes to show no good deed goes unpunished. I don't think I'd get an attorney, bring in the police, etc. To me, that would just open the can of worms even wider. I'd check the house myself and be a lot more careful for a while. What you did was dumb perhaps, but I don't see it as a killer.

You threw the kid out, I trust? If not, that could be a problem.

[alecia777]

Retdetsgt, Oh yes I threw him out that night. It was very dumb, I believed him that he would not be using drugs and that he really wanted to do the right thing. It was a sad time, I loved that boy like my own. And I will admit, I was pretty naive about drug use back then. This incident occured about 10 yrs ago. Not nearly as naive today, and I think I have checked every bowl since

[greg72982]

So you wouldn't recommend we add crack to our pasta salads??

[alecia777]

Gregg, LOL. No I would not!!! But thank you for the laugh

[Samuel]

I Think if a piece of crack cocaine was large enough that you could feel it as you bit down and make your throat and mouth go numb, a test would have shown the presence of the substance in your system. Maybe it wasn't drugs? I also Think that it would be very strange for a drug user to hide only one rock, unwrapped/exposed, in a bowl in a pantry - but then again, drug users do very strange things that seem perfectly normal to them....

[alecia777]

Samuel, yes I have wondered about that myself. Especially the last few days, The only thing I can think of is that in my panic I spit up the piece. I really don't know. I don't have any evidence that it was indeed crack cocaine, seeing as I had obviously chewed it, but if it was not i can't imagine what else would have caused the numbness. At the time my step-son of course denied it and after my husband searched him and his room no other drugs were found, so it could possibly have been something else. My step-son was battling that paticular drug addiction at that time so we both assumed that was what it was. Again the numbness factor played a big part in that, but who knows??? The tests did come back negative so........I will agree on the strange hiding spots, years after this happened I did a year of volenteer work at a Christian drug treatment center and one of my duties was flipping rooms. I have found drugs in some of the craziest places!!!