Faulty fentanyl tests spurred NYC’s push to ban mail on Rikers Island

NEW YORK– In 2022, New York City Prison Commissioner Louis Molina issued a dire warning to local lawmakers: Fentanyl was flowing through the mail into Rikers Island, he said, sparking an overdose crisis among the prison’s inmates and endangering guards.

As evidence of the insidious threat, Molina circulated a child’s drawing of a reindeer, one of hundreds of seized items that he said had been “literally soaked in the drug and sent to people in custody.”

But that claim was based on defective drug testing kits with a staggering 85% false-positive rate, according to a report released Wednesday by the city’s Department of Investigations. The report found that the city vastly overestimated the prevalence of fentanyl sent through the mail to inmates.

When researchers retested 71 pieces of mail that had initially been flagged by field testing as containing fentanyl, only 10 actually showed traces of the drug. The drawing of a reindeer highlighted by Molina was fentanyl-free.

Field tests indicating an influx of fentanyl-laced mail to Rikers Island sparked a yearslong campaign by Mayor Eric Adams to ban people in city custody from receiving physical mail.

As a replacement, city officials proposed forwarding the mail to a third-party provider, which would then upload it digitally for the inmate to read on a tablet — a practice used in other correctional systems, including New York state prisons. So far, the proposal has been blocked by a prison oversight committee.

Jocelyn Strauber, the commissioner of the Department of Investigations, said the city should reassess its ongoing efforts to prevent inmates from receiving mail in light of the report’s findings.

“The field testing does not support the concern that there are a lot of fentanyl-laced items coming in the mail,” she told The Associated Press. “To the extent that policies are based on flawed data, they need to be reconsidered.”

Inmate advocates have long argued that drugs enter the prison system primarily through employees, who can easily smuggle them in and sell them to gang leaders. In recent years dozens of corrections officers have been charged in multiple investigations into smuggling rings on Rikers Island.

In its report, the Department of Investigation said corrections officials had failed to implement many of the department’s previous recommendations aimed at screening personnel for contraband.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Correction said the agency would review the report and continue to refine its testing processes. “Field tests are a tool used to quickly assess potential threats, and while they are not perfect, they play an important role in our safety protocols,” the statement said.

Such field tests have gained popularity in recent years, alongside a spike in opioid overdose deaths across the country, allowing law enforcement officials to bypass the lengthy laboratory process of determining whether a substance contains narcotics.

But experts have long raised questions about the effectiveness of the strips. Federal regulations require manufacturers to include language on their packaging indicating that results are preliminary until confirmed by a laboratory – something that rarely happens in correctional settings.

Last November, this proved to be the case in New York’s state prison system wrongly punished more than 2,000 inmates due to false positives from drug tests manufactured by Sirchie Finger Print Laboratories.

For years, the test strips used at Rikers Island, the city-run prison system, were also supplied by Sirchie. But after complaints about the reliability of the tests, the Department of Correction switched to kits from DetectaChem last April.

The investigation by the Department of Investigation found that DetectaChem’s test strips had a 79% false positive rate, while Sirchie’s were wrong 91% of the time.

Questions to Sirchie were not answered.

Travis Kisner, DetectaChem’s chief operating officer, said the company was still reviewing the report, but added, “We stand behind our product.”