“Take a Valium, Lose Your Kid, Go to Jail”

During pregnancy “occasional, small doses of diazepam (the generic name for Valium) are considered safe,” writes Nina Martin in a new ProPublica investigation. “But one morning a few weeks later, when [Casey] Shehi was back at her job in a nursing home and the baby was with a sitter, investigators from the Etowah County [Alabama] Sheriff’s Office showed up at the front desk with a warrant. She had been charged with ‘knowingly, recklessly, or intentionally’ causing her baby to be exposed to controlled substances in the womb — a felony punishable in her case by up to 10 years in prison. The investigators led her to an unmarked car, handcuffed her and took her to jail.” 


Read the whole thing here to learn what happened next. “Shehi had run afoul of Alabama’s ‘chemical endangerment of a child’ statute, the country’s toughest criminal law on prenatal drug use.” It provides for imprisonment of up to ten years in cases where the developing baby has suffered no ill effects from an exposure, as in this case. More than 1,800 women have been arrested under its terms since its passage in 2006. 


In the 2001 case of Ferguson v. City of Charleston the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that a joint state hospital‐​police program in Charleston, D.C., infringed the Fourth Amendment rights of pregnant women by subjecting them to drug screening without their knowledge or consent and relaying the results to authorities for prosecution. My colleague Tim Lynch wrote about that case here. 


You can explore Cato’s decades of research on the Drug War and its consequences for liberty here (adapted and expanded from Overlawyered).