It’s a common mistake. A “my bad” moment that we’ve all experienced. You’re going to smoke some meth and, uh oh, it’s SpaghettiOs. Or vice versa. You’re sat before a heaping bowl of SpaghettiOs when it turns out it was actually a bunch of meth. It happens!
This common mistake that all of us make all the time, unfortunately, landed a Georgia woman in jail for a month when cops mistook some SpaghettiOs encrusted onto her spoon for meth.
Videos by VICE
This all went down in Gainesville, Georgia, when a 23-year-old woman named Ashley Gabrielle Huff was detained on a July 2 traffic stop. The traffic officer found a spoon with a “suspicious residue” in her car. Huff argued that there was nothing mysterious about the residue at all. It was SpaghettiOs, sweet and innocent SpaghettiOs.
The officer begged to differ, arguing that it was methamphetamine. This was further supported when the cop found a glass pipe in her bag. The officer conducted a field test on the spoon and said it was riddled with methamphetamine. Field tests are notoriously unreliable and often quite wrong.
Huff was jailed for two weeks and then released. She missed one court appointment, so she was thrown back in jail, where she stayed a little longer because she couldn’t afford bond. It was while she was incarcerated that lab analysis revealed that the substance on the spoon was not methamphetamine. It was delicious SpaghettiOs, as she’d said all along.
As a testament to how fucked the US legal system is, Huff was proven to be innocent—yet, while she was jailed, she first considered taking a plea deal just so she could get out of jail, which would have saddled her with a criminal record and affected her for the rest of her life. Luckily, all charges have been dismissed since it isn’t illegal to carry around a dirty spoon. Though it is hygienically questionable.