Faulty fentanyl tests spurred NYC’s push to ban mail on Rikers Island
Associated PressNEW YORK — In 2022, New York City’s jails commissioner, Louis Molina, issued a dire warning to local lawmakers: fentanyl was pouring into Rikers Island through the mail, he said, spurring an overdose crisis among the jail’s detainees and putting guards at risk. As evidence of the insidious threat, Molina passed around a child’s drawing of a reindeer, one of hundreds of seized items he said had been “literally soaked in the drug and mailed to people in custody.” But that claim was based on faulty drug-testing kits with a stunning 85% false positive rate, according to a report released Wednesday by the city’s Department of Investigation. Field tests indicating an influx of fentanyl-laced mail to Rikers Island fueled a yearslong campaign by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to bar people in city custody from receiving physical mail. Last November, New York’s state prison system was found to have wrongly punished more than 2,000 detainees due to false positives from drug tests manufactured by Sirchie Finger Print Laboratories.
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