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Skip to content Sections SEARCH New York SUBSCRIBE FOR $1/WEEKLog in Wednesday, May 17, 2023 Today’s Paper SUBSCRIBE FOR $1/WEEK New York|She Smoked Weed, Legally, Then Gave Birth. New York Took Her Baby. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/nyregion/marijuana-mother-child-removed-lawsuit.html * Give this article * * Advertisement Continue reading the main story Supported by Continue reading the main story SHE SMOKED WEED, LEGALLY, THEN GAVE BIRTH. NEW YORK TOOK HER BABY. The city’s child welfare agency is not supposed to remove children solely because of a parent’s marijuana use. A mother says the agency did so anyway, and now she is suing. * Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Give this article * * * Read in app Chanetto Rivers fought for custody of her baby after he was taken from her because she smoked marijuana shortly before giving birth.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times By Andy Newman May 17, 2023Updated 5:12 p.m. ET For Chanetto Rivers, the birth of her third child went relatively smoothly. About an hour after she arrived at the hospital in the Bronx, she was holding her newborn son. But while she was pushing, in a maternity room crowded with doctors and nurses, someone asked a question: Had she consumed drugs or alcohol? Ms. Rivers answered that she had smoked marijuana at a family barbecue hours earlier. She thought nothing of it — it was August 2021; marijuana had been legal in New York for months. Without Ms. Rivers’s consent, she said, she and her baby were tested for drugs. Both were positive for marijuana. Two days later, the city’s child welfare agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, ordered the hospital not to release the baby to Ms. Rivers, her lawyers said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Two days after that, A.C.S. told Ms. Rivers it was opening a neglect case and moving to place her baby in foster care. New York’s legalization law bars removing a child for a parent’s marijuana use alone. A.C.S.’s policy states that marijuana in an infant’s system is not grounds for removal without a finding that the baby might be impaired, and A.C.S. never said that the baby, identified in court papers as T.W., was harmed by the marijuana exposure, Ms. Rivers’s lawyers said. But it took nearly a week altogether, multiple trips to court and a judge’s order before she gained custody of her son. MORE ABOUT CANNABIS WITH RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA BECOMING LEGAL IN SEVERAL STATES, CANNABIS PRODUCTS ARE BECOMING MORE EASILY AVAILABLE AND INCREASINGLY VARIED. * Federal Recruiters Relax Rules: As more states legalize marijuana and competition for talent grows fiercer, the U.S. government is loosening hiring rules from the “Just Say No” era. * Weed Addiction: Though the consequences of cannabis use disorder are not as severe as with other drugs, it can affect your quality of life. * Cannabis and Sleep: We asked some experts to explain marijuana’s effects on sleep. Here is what to know. * Betting the Farm on Weed: The Hepworth sisters are famous in the organic food world, but like other farmers, they’re struggling. They hope their new cannabis venture will change things. Even then, she was not free of A.C.S. For three more months, her lawyers said, the agency required her to attend classes in parenting and anger management and to take drug tests. Caseworkers came to her apartment unannounced at random hours, including in the middle of the night. On Wednesday, Ms. Rivers’s lawyers, the Bronx Defenders, sued A.C.S. on her behalf in federal court in Manhattan. The suit says the agency went after Ms. Rivers so aggressively “not because A.C.S. was trying to protect T.W.” but “because Ms. Rivers is Black.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The lawsuit argues that Ms. Rivers’s treatment fits a decades-long pattern of discrimination against Black families by A.C.S., some of it documented in a 2020 audit in which the agency’s own employees said that A.C.S. was racist. The lawsuit also noted that one of the main purposes of the Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act of 2021 was to undo generations of harm caused by drug laws that were disproportionately wielded against Black and Hispanic people. Ms. Rivers’s lead lawyer, Niji Jain, said the agency’s removal of T.W. “was the wrong decision on the law, it was the wrong decision on the facts, and then there’s the historical context.” She was referring, in part, to the largely discredited “crack baby” hysteria of the 1980s and ’90s, in which researchers and media reports falsely described a vast epidemic of children damaged by their mothers’ cocaine use. The case comes as marijuana’s legalization in New York has created uncertainty for authorities about how to treat its use. The state now bars employers from discriminating against workers who use marijuana legally; there are exceptions for employees who are impaired by marijuana while working, though there is no clearly drawn definition of impairment. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Ms. Rivers had a prior child welfare case; she lost custody of her two older children in 2016 for drug and alcohol use and for failing to obtain medical care for her older son. But her lawyers said that her history was irrelevant. They said that A.C.S. had already cleared her to regain custody of her older children (though they had not yet moved back in with her at the time of T.W.’s birth because of court delays), and that both judges who presided over the T.W. case had said Ms. Rivers’s earlier case did not create an imminent risk to the baby. A.C.S. also said that the hospital said Ms. Rivers had smoked marijuana in her room, an accusation she denied, according to the suit. A.C.S. said it was barred from commenting on individual cases by state confidentiality laws but stated that it does not remove children based solely on a parent’s use of marijuana. “When A.C.S. investigates a case involving an allegation of parental drug/alcohol misuse (regardless of what the substance is), A.C.S.’s policy and practice mandated under law is to assess the impact any misuse has or may imminently have on child safety,” an agency spokeswoman, Stephanie Gendell, said in a statement. Advertisement Continue reading the main story While there have been other instances since legalization where A.C.S. cited a parent’s marijuana use as a reason to remove a child, Bronx Defenders said Ms. Rivers’s case was the first they knew of where it was the only reason. According to the suit, T.W. did not receive any treatment at the hospital related to the marijuana exposure. The lawsuit, which Bronx Defenders co-filed with the firm Arnold & Porter, also charges A.C.S. with violating Ms. Rivers’s constitutional right to due process. The two parties filed a companion suit on Wednesday charging that A.C.S. had illegally withheld documents connected to the racial equity audit. Research has shown that Black expectant mothers are tested disproportionately for drugs. A study published last month in the journal JAMA Health Forum of nearly 40,000 births in Pennsylvania hospitals from 2018 to 2021 found that Black mothers were more likely to be drug-tested than white mothers, even though white mothers were more likely to test positive. Ms. Rivers’s hospital, BronxCare Health System, did not immediately respond to questions on Wednesday about whether it had tested Ms. Rivers and her son without her consent. Research also suggests that the first days of a baby’s life are a critical bonding time. While T.W. was in the hospital, Ms. Rivers, 34, was allowed to visit him every day, but only briefly, she said. When T.W. was brought to her, “it was like I was being watched and calculated and observed,” she said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Every time I went there, I would try to feed him and they’d be like, ‘Oh, we already fed him,’ or ‘we already changed his Pamper’ — they did everything that nurtured my own baby,” she said. Dr. Mishka Terplan, an author of the Pennsylvania study, said in an email that measurable effects of prenatal cannabis use on child development “are rare, subtle, and of uncertain clinical significance.” Dr. Terplan added that in cases like Ms. Rivers’s, “separation of a child from its care giver is likely significantly worse for its development than the cannabis exposure.” Ms. Rivers’s case came before two family court judges. The first said he found it “troubling that A.C.S. runs to court” to seek removal based purely on marijuana use, the suit states. The second ordered A.C.S. to return Ms. Rivers’s baby, over the agency’s objections. The judge noted that while she believed testimony that Ms. Rivers had smoked marijuana in the hospital, “that still does not rise to the level of imminent risk,” according to the suit. The T.W. case ended up further delaying Ms. Rivers’s efforts to regain custody of her older children, the suit states. She won custody of them only after A.C.S. dropped the T.W. case, 107 days after he was born. Advertisement Continue reading the main story SITE INDEX SITE INFORMATION NAVIGATION * © 2023 The New York Times Company * NYTCo * Contact Us * Accessibility * Work with us * Advertise * T Brand Studio * Your Ad Choices * Privacy Policy * Terms of Service * Terms of Sale * Site Map * Canada * International * Help * Subscriptions Enjoy unlimited access to all of The Times. 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