On a clear day in downtown Greenwood, Bryan Getchius stood as a free man.
Two years earlier, this would not look to be a strong possibility. In May 2024, Getchius was arrested following a traffic stop by Greenwood County Sheriff’s Department deputies and charged with trafficking illegal drugs.
The arresting officers had done a field drug test on some pills Getchius has been carrying. They were blue and, according to the arrest warrant, “appeared to be poorly made, broke apart with a very small amount of force and were consistent with clandestinely manufactured Fentanyl pills.”
The thing is, the pills were not fentanyl, nor were they illegal. They were prescription pills for Getchius’ irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. That was proven by a laborator-performed drug analysis by the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED).
On Oct. 1, 2025 -- nearly a year-and-a-half after Getchius was charged -- SLED issued a report that identified the pills as dicyclomine, a medication prescribed to treat IBS.
On this clear March morning, almost two years after his arrest, Getchius and his attorney, Tyler Bailey, announced a federal civil rights lawsuit against the County of Greenwood, the Greenwood County Sheriff's Department, Sheriff Dennis Kelly, and three deputies.
“ Officers found some IBS medication that Mr. Getchius was prescribed to take,” Bailey said Wednesday at a press conference at which the lawsuit was announced. “He explained that to them, it’s on body camera footage, that was his IBS medication. The officer, even during his own independent, I wouldn't even call it investigation, Google searched and looked at the medication, saw that it was the actual IBS medication he was prescribed to take. Nevertheless, he decided to use an unreliable field drug kit.”
Representatives from neither the Greenwood County Sheriff’s Department nor Greenwood County responded to requests for an interview regarding this story.
Reliability is the question
At the heart of Bailey’s argument against the Sheriff’s Department is the reliability of field drug tests. In a 2023 report, the University of Pennsylvania’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice estimated that as many as 773,000 drug-related arrests per year “involve the use of presumptive tests.”
Of those, the center estimated “based on the imperfect data that are available … that around 30,000 arrests each year involve people who do not possess illegal substances but who are nonetheless falsely implicated by color-based presumptive tests.”
That same year, ProPublica reported on a growing trend of U.S. courts banning presumptive drug tests. Two years later, in 2025, the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke University called false positives “not just possible, but an inherent defect of presumptive field tests.”
Dayne Phillips, a partner and managing attorney at Price Benowitz in Columbia, said that faulty field drug tests are “not extremely common, but are a significant problem,” adding, “clearly they’re not infallible.”
Phillips is not connected to the Getchius case. He spoke in a phone interview Thursday about issues regarding field drug tests used by police departments in the U.S. He said that one of the major problems with field drug tests is that there is always a risk of misinterpretation of results gathered by using them. Laboratories, where quality controls are strict, he said, are best suited to making determinations of what a substance is.
Another issue, Phillips said, is that training on drug test kits for officers is not uniform or even consistent, and that police officers are not scientists.
“It’s not that these tests don’t have any use,” he said, “but any time you’re dealing with anything even remotely scientific, the misapplication of forensic science is one of [the risks].”
Bailey said he does not want to see these tests used at all, but if they are, “ there needs to be more training on it.” He said that field tests “ could be essentially giving untrue, misleading, or false information to the court, which is the basis for bond and how somebody's treated.”
A history of substance use disorder
Bryan Getchius is no stranger to drug addiction. He openly speaks about his history of substance use disorder and works in the field of substance use counseling.
On Wednesday, Getchius said that he had been sober (and working in the field) at the time of his arrest. He described being detained in Greenwood County for two weeks, sleeping on the floor, and being unable to get his IBS medication.
Because of his arrest, Getchius lost his job, was under house arrest at his mother’s residence, and spent thousands of dollars on attorneys’ fees.
He said he also was pushed to take a plea deal, to bring down his sentence of, potentially, 45 years.
“ That's tough to have in the back of your head,” he said.
The 2023 Penn report referenced “the ongoing problem of inherently coercive plea bargaining,” saying that defendants usually waive their rights to restructure a deal once they make it.
“Bryan, knowing he's innocent, demanded that, ‘I'm not going to plead guilty,’” Bailey said. “And then the prosecution solicitor office eventually dismissed the case.”
Bailey called the attempt to elicit a plea deal from Getchius a way for court and police officials to absolve themselves from accountability.
While waiting for his case to resolve, Getchius said, he fought hard not to relapse, and that he did not -- even as he described losing his ability to attend meetings that help keep him off drugs.
“I was sent back to ground zero with nothing,” he said. “Several months on house arrest. I was isolated. I'm sure that everybody probably has heard the TED talks and stuff that say ‘the opposite of addiction is connection,’ and it truly is. And they took me away from that connection. They took me away from everything that helped me to get and stay sober.”
The lawsuit accuses Greenwood County, Sheriff Kelly, and three deputies of false arrest, malicious prosecution, negligent supervision, and violations of Getchius’ civil constitutional rights. The suit was filed in federal court in Greenwood County Tuesday.
