There's an article in yesterday's NYT about a news conference by the Waller Co Prosecutor, Warren Diepraam, who held the event to announce his finding that Sandra Bland hung herself with a plastic garbage bag while being held in a County Jail following a bogus and brutal arrest for failing to signal a lane change.
There are other very sketchy issues in this article that are worthy of close inspection, but I'm only going to focus on the one that jumped out at me when I read it and leave it to others to deal with the rest of the news account.
Here's the passage that screamed "WTF??" at me when I read it just now:
An initial toxicology test also indicated that Ms. Bland had recently smoked or eaten marijuana, Mr. Diepraam said. He noted that because traces of marijuana leave the body quickly, she had to have consumed it not long before she died, and he said it could have been used in the jail.
Inmates near Ms. Bland’s cell did not smell marijuana smoke, and the cell contained no evidence of the drug, he said. He raised the possibility that she could have ingested it right before the traffic stop to avoid being arrested for drug possession. Explaining why the information was relevant, he said, “It is a mood-altering substance and a mood amplifier.”
More extensive drug tests may shed more light on that question later, he said.
The emphases are mine, obviously, but those lines are the ones that screamed at me, for what I assume most of you reading this already know: pot does not leave your body quickly, it stays in your system for up to a month, long after the effects of the high have completely dissipated. That this DA would insert that obvious bit of misinformation into his "finding" would be totally mystifying...if it weren't for the second set of bolded sentences in that blockquote, which can be summed up as:
"We think she killed herself because she was high after eating a bunch of pot during the traffic stop to prevent herself from being busted for drug possession."
Why the "paper of record" failed to note the completely obvious factual misstatement by the DA regarding the time it takes for trace marijuana to leave the system is confounding but hardly surprising these days. The propensity for MJ to hang in the bloodstream for much longer than other drugs is general knowledge, not something on the cutting edge of medical science that has yet to be determined for crissake.
Final note: I wonder if this is what the "defective" autopsy thing is all about? Does the Waller Co DA need to have a higher than "trace" amount of pot in Sandra Bland's blood in order for them to bolster their suicide finding with pot as a mood enhancer, the evil weed driving her deeper into depression?
