When news of a Brooklyn man suing the NYPD for confusing his Jolly Ranchers with crystal meth surfaced earlier this week, who knew it was a growing the trend.
According to DNAInfo, George Pringle, a Staten Island man, recently received $42,500 as part of a settlement after officers arrested him for carrying peppermint candies they intially believed were crack, his lawyer said.
Pringle was stopped-and-frisked on Feb 2. 2011 as he walked out of a barber shop. Cops accused him of selling loose cigarettes. The 57-year-old substance abuse counselor, was arrested after police said the peppermint found in his pocket was crack cocaine.
"These officers knew it was a piece of candy and intentionally did not field test it," Pringle's lawyer, Jason Leventhal, said in a statement. "The NYPD's failure to require a routine field test for all drug arrests endangers the constitutional rights of all New Yorkers."
Pringle told them it was candy and suggested they taste it, but he was still arrested and imprisoned for 27 hours. Charges were dropped when someone finally got around to checking if the peppermints were actually drugs.
Brooklyn native, Love Olantunjiojo, was detained for 24 hours, last June, after cops found what they thought was crystal meth, but turned out to be Jolly Ranchers,
According to the New York Daily News, after purchasing Jolly Ranchers at the It'Sugar candy on Surf Ave, in Coney Island, Olantunjiojo and his fiend were stopped by police officers, who performed a search and discovered the candies.
Officer Jermaine Taylor administered a "field test" to determine if in fact what he and the other cops discovered were narcotics, and according to an official complaint filed by Olantunjiojo's lawyer, they had a "positive" result.
The candies, which were described as "red crystalline rocks of solid material" and "blue crystalline rocks of solid material," were, according to the Daily News, then tested back at the NYPD lab using "gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis."
The results from the NYPD lab found the red and blue items were not a controlled substance, but Jolly Ranchers, the lawsuit stated. The cop who arrested Olatunjiojo stated he had professional training in the identification of methamphetamine, the Daily News reported.
"Crystal meth is produced in all kinds of colors," Former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Mike Levine said. "There's a type that's going around that looks like strawberry Pop Rocks candy. Dope dealers will disguise their product in any way you can imagine."
