Honey or drugs? For US Customs, it's hard to tell the difference. At the expense of a man, detained for 82 days as a result of this miscalculation.
A Kafkaesque story
This Kafkaesque story came to Leon Haughton, a 45-year-old family man who, like every Christmas since he moved to the state of Maryland a decade ago, is going to visit his Jamaican family. As reported on Friday the Washington Post , the incredible legal-administrative disputes of this man start December 29 at the Baltimore airport, when a customs dog starts to sniff his bag. Inside: three large, properly labeled bottles of artisanal honey, with which he likes to flavor his tea.
But customs officials suspect him, according to the indictment, to carry liquid methamphetamine, and place him in detention. The results of a Maryland lab take more than two weeks to arrive: they are negative. Leon Haughton thinks he's out of the woods. He is wrong.
82 days of detention for nothing
First, the laboratory used for the first tests is not sufficiently equipped to analyze liquids. The bottles must be sent to a second laboratory in the state of Georgia. Then, the arrest of the Jamaican, holder of a green card allowing him to reside legally in the United States, triggered a procedure with the immigration services, that his lawyer has all the trouble in the world to contact. And for good reason: the American administration is affected by the "shutdown", the generalized paralysis of public services caused by the standoff between Donald Trump and the Democratic opposition on the financing of the wall that the president wants to erect at the border with Mexico.
Analyzes done in Georgia finally confirm that Leon Haughton was carrying honey well. He is released on March 21, 82 days after returning from vacation. Nearly three months behind bars, away from his companion and his children, which made him lose his two jobs in cleaning and building. "They ruined my life," the Washington Post told the forty-year-old, for whom the pill is hard to swallow. Even with honey.