More meth, cocaine contamination found at Washington state toxicology lab
Recent sampling at Washington’s only forensic toxicology laboratory has found more areas contaminated with methamphetamine and cocaine, raising further skepticism among defense lawyers about the integrity of blood testing being performed at a lab relied upon in thousands of criminal cases and death investigations statewide.
The latest sampling at the Washington State Patrol Toxicology Laboratory detected residual levels of cocaine on five sites and meth on four sites within the lab — mostly ceiling vents and air intake systems, a report posted this month on the lab’s website shows. Samples of three additional sites also tested presumptively positive for other drugs.
Lab officials, who maintain that blood testing isn’t being compromised by the lab’s background contamination, say the tainted sites detected by the sampling were cleaned last month. The lab will continue to periodically take samples to check for contamination in its work areas and is coordinating workplace safety and air handling assessments from a federal occupational health agency, Capt. Neil Weaver, a State Patrol spokesman, said in an email.
The lab also is receiving guidance from a state forensics advisory panel to ensure any required legal disclosures about the contamination issues are made to defendants, Weaver said.
But a lawyer who has spearheaded calls by Washington’s defense bar for an outside investigation of the lab says the latest sampling only underscores the need for the state to own up to and fix a problem that potentially throws all of the lab’s blood testing into question.
“The fact that there is still contamination despite the public messaging from the state is very alarming,” said Lynnwood public defender Bruce Adsero, whose law firm, Feldman & Lee, has pushed for more transparency from the state about the lab’s ongoing contamination problems since last year.
False positives
The latest sampling results come after the tox lab, housed on the third floor of a South Seattle office building, had falsely detected meth in blood samples tested for 11 cases since 2019. The problems surfaced after the lab expanded its operations in March 2018 across a hallway and into an annex work area where scientists with the State Patrol’s crime lab once had set up makeshift meth labs for training purposes.
Tox lab officials, after discovering a rash of false positive meth results in mid-2019, abandoned the annex space and hired a contractor, BioClean, to clean up widespread contamination detected there. But more than a year later, lab officials still hadn’t notified prosecutors — who are obligated to disclose potentially exculpatory information to defendants — about the contamination.
Prosecuting groups started disclosing some details about the problem to Washington’s legal defense community in August 2020. By then, the tox lab had returned operations to its main laboratory, where all blood testing work is now performed.
But the contamination problems have persisted, with false meth results showing up in two of the 11 cases this year.