A hole in his bagel defense
Jailer axed despite ‘poppy’ppy drugg ruling g
A jail guard’s bagel defense just got toasted.
The city Department of Correction ordered an officer fired on Tuesday for failing a drug test — even though an administrative law judge recently cleared him of the allegations on the grounds that his positive result was likely caused by eating a poppy seed bagel and not for getting high on dope.
Officer Eleazer Paz — who makes $82,000 a year — thought he had caught a break two months ago when Judge John Spooner bought the argument of a drug expert he hired to back up his claim that his positive test results were due to an innocent bagel with a shmear.
“Based upon the evidence in this case, I conclude that the most likely source of the positive morphine and codeine test results was the ingestion of poppy seeds and not the use of medications,” Spooner said in a June 6 decision.
But the judge’s findings were only a recommendation — which DOC Commissioner Cynthia Brann declined to take as she notified the 10-year veteran Tuesday he was being fired anyway, sources said.
“We are surprised and disappointed at the commissioner’s decision,” Paz’s lawyer, Andrew Grossman, told The Post. “Judge Spooner heard multiple days of testimony, weighed the evidence and gave a well-reasoned decision while the commissioner appears to have reached her conclusion first and worked backwards to justify it . . . ignoring the testimony.”
The Department of Correction, however, stood by the decision, telling The Post: “There is no real evidence that a few poppy seeds can make you fail a drug test.”
The judge had been swayed by the arguments of Dr. William Sawyer, who told the court that test results showing 522 nanograms per milliliter of morphine and 358 nanograms per milliliter of codeine “could only be explained by eating poppy seed bagels because the quantities of the drugs were . . . inconsistent with heroin or individual morphine and codeine ingestion.”
According to Sawyer, the federal government in 1997 raised the threshold for testing positive for drug use to 2,000 nanograms after studies showed unwashed poppy seeds could produce levels above 300 nanograms — the current threshold still being used by the Department of Correction.
Ajai Saini, whose Lab Corp conducted the test for the city, however, insisted the substances picked up in a urine test were “inconsistent with ingestion of poppy seeds alone.”
But the judge concluded that Sawyer — who holds a PhD in toxicology and teaches the subject to medical students — had a better grasp of the issue.
“Mr. Saini’s statements as to the impossibility of poppy seed cooked products producing codeine levels above the legal cutoffs were convincingly refuted by the toxicology articles,” the judge wrote.
Opium comes from the poppy plant, but the seeds don’t contain the drug. They can, however, pick up some opiate residue on them during processing if they aren’t washed enough, according to the US Anti-Doping Agency, which says on its Web site “it may be possible to exceed the morphine threshold [for sports drug tests] by eating foods with poppy seeds.” The group advises athletes to not eat poppy seeds for “a few days” before competitions.