Heavily pregnant Susan Horton could feel her contractions starting but still had to make dinner for her family.
So she grabbed the easiest thing possible, frozen pizzas and a pre-packaged Costco salad that contained poppy seeds.
But when she gave birth at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in California the next morning she was told she couldn’t take her healthy newborn baby girl home.
Tests had detected opiates in the mother-of-five’s urine, which doctors interpreted as she was abusing prescription drugs.
A horrified Ms Horton pleaded with them that she’d ‘never done drugs in my life’ and by process of elimination worked it the test must have been caused by the poppy seeds — which contain opiates and have been known to show up in drug tests.
Susan Horton, pictured above with one of her children, had to battle for two weeks to get her youngest back after an erroneous drug test
What followed was a humiliating two-week battle to get her daughter Hallie back.
Ms Horton had to leave the hospital without her child and was dragged before a juvenile court to prove she wasn’t a danger to her child.
She told Reveal News: ‘He’s [the doctor] like, “Well, your urine tested positive for opiates.” I said, “That makes no sense. I’ve never done drugs in my life.”
‘They refused to take a new sample. They took her. I had to leave the hospital without her.
‘I felt very emotional and I was alone. I just gave birth the day before, I’m not sleeping, and I just felt really ganged up upon.
‘They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something and it was wrong.’
Her urine had tested positive for the opiate called codeine, which is found in prescription cough medicine and, at times, in unwashed poppy seeds.
The substance is contained in the plant’s seed pods, and can get onto seeds during harvesting and then result in a positive drug test.
Last year, the US army warned its soldiers not to eat poppy seed-covered bagels or muffins that contain them, warning this could affect drug test results.
And in March last year two mothers in New Jersey sued a hospital over their drug test results, saying the positives were due to them eating bagels with poppy seeds.
Online, the University of Florida’s health system warns that while poppy seeds don’t contain nearly enough opiates to intoxicate someone, the ‘exquisitely sensitive’ nature of drug tests means the seeds can still trigger a positive result.
Despite Ms Horton’s protests, however. the hospital alerted child protection services which sent an officer to conduct an interview.
The mother is revealing her story to warn others of the dangers
When she refused to sign a safety plan, a document that would allow the agency to interview her friends and family and search her home, they got a judge to sign a document starting the process to take her child away.
The mother, who is based in Santa Rosa, then had to appear in front of a juvenile court to assure a judge that she was not a danger to her child. After negotiations, she did then also agree to an inspection of her home and further testing before a judge dismissed the case and allowed her to bring the baby home.
Ms Horton had no idea she was going to be drug tested after giving birth, with there being a patchy system for doing this up and down the country.
In most cases, it is up to hospitals and doctors whether to perform drug tests on mothers — which is generally only done for babies of mothers who are suspected of substance abuse or have a hisotry of substance abuse.
Only four states — North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Kentucky — require hospitals to test both new mothers and their children if medical professionals suspect drug use.
In 2022, estimates suggest that more than 35,000 cases of mothers testing positive for drugs were reported — resulting in more than 6,000 children being removed from their families.
Ms Horton said she was revealing her story to warn others over the risks and prompt more safe-guards to be put in place for false positives. She doesn’t want hospitals to keep taking the test results at face value.
A spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente, where she gave birth, said that they could not comment on her specific case but took their role seriously.
They added that the hospital always conducts a ‘multifaceted assessment before reporting someone’.
An official with the CPS suggested to Reveal News that a positive drug test alone normally does not warrant an investigation.
