By Fraidy Reiss
Ashbury Park Press
JACKSON, N.J. — He could have gotten back his job and all of the pay he missed since last September.
But Brian K. Darcy, a local resident who says he was fired from the state Department of Corrections for eating poppy-seed rolls, has turned down the settlement offer.
“This is bigger than just me,” he said Thursday. “If it was just me, I’d take the offer.”
Darcy, 37, worked for six years as a senior corrections officer at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton before he was fired last year for testing positive for opiates in a surprise drug test. He has called the results of the March 17, 2006, screening a false positive and blamed it on poppy seed rolls he ate that morning and the previous evening.
On Tuesday, Darcy went to the state Office of Administrative Law and signed a settlement agreement the state had drafted, which would have reinstated him and given him back pay.
Then he changed his mind.
Under the agreement, Darcy said, he would not have returned to his job at the maximum-security New Jersey State Prison. Instead, he would have been asked to choose one of three medium- to minimum-security facilities, a “step down” for him, he said — although his salary would have remained the same as before.
More importantly, he said, nowhere in the agreement did the state acknowledge it uses flawed drug-testing methods that can mistake poppy seeds for opiates.
“All I wanted was to return to where I was before, and do something about the drug policy so it doesn’t trip somebody else up,” Darcy said.
He pointed out that he was not the first state employee to lose his job because of poppy seeds. Reginald Fredette, also a Jackson resident, was fired from the Department of Corrections in 2000 because of a positive drug test that he attributed to poppy-seed bagels.
Fredette was reinstated after arguing that New Jersey’s standards for opiate tests were more strict than the federal government’s. He could not be reached for comment Thursday.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1998 changed its cutoff for opiates to 2,000 nanograms per milliliter, from 300, after finding that most positive tests below the 2,000 level were due to poppy seeds or prescription medication, according to the department’s Web site.
New Jersey’s cutoff at the time was 300 nanograms, but the state later changed its policy because of the Fredette case, according to Deirdre Fedkenheuer, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections. The state now requires follow-up screening for law enforcement personnel whose initial test shows between 300 and 2,000 nanograms.
Fedkenheuer declined to comment on the specifics of Darcy’s case.
Darcy’s follow-up test, which was performed on a portion of his original urine sample, came up positive for morphine. He attributed those results to the same poppy-seed rolls he said he ate before his drug test.
And he called on the state to change its drug-testing policy, saying if a 2,000 cutoff is good enough for the federal government, it should be good enough for New Jersey.
“We’re not Homeland Security or FBI,” he said. “We’re just prison guards.”
Richard Saferstein, former chief forensic scientist for the New Jersey State Police, agreed with Darcy. A test with a cutoff of 300 nanograms per milliliter can show a false positive for anyone who eats even a single poppy-seed roll in the 24 hours before giving a urine sample, he said.
The state can avoid that problem by raising the cutoff to 2,000 or by asking people to fill out a questionnaire before they are tested, in which they list all of the foods they ate in the past 24 hours, Saferstein said.
He said false positives resulting from poppy seeds do not occur often. In the last couple of years, he said, he has seen only two or three such cases, including Darcy’s.
Darryl M. Saunders, Darcy’s attorney, said he was suffering from “major agita” since his client refused to accept the state’s settlement offer. Although he signed the settlement agreement, when the judge later asked him if he did so willingly, he said no.
“But he has other fights that he wants to fight,” Saunders said. “The poppy-seed guy got his job back, but he has other issues.”
However, a change in state drug-testing policy would not come through the Office of Administrative Law, he said. Instead, he said, Darcy should ask his union to push for that change through collective bargaining.
Now Darcy must schedule an administrative-law hearing if he wants his job back, Saunders said. But he predicted the state will pre-empt a hearing by withdrawing its disciplinary action and ordering Darcy to return to his job.
Darcy, who has been working for a landscaper while he fights for his Department of Corrections position, said he will continue to advocate for a change in state drug-testing policy no matter what happens with his job — and no matter what his attorney thinks.
“My lawyer was happy I won the case, but I didn’t really win,” Darcy said. “What did I win?”
Copyright 2007 Ashbury Park Press