Cocaine or pre-workout? Airman fights drug conviction

What if the drug bust that tanked your military career might have actually been the result of a bad batch of workout supplement?

That’s the conclusion that an enlisted airman hopes a military appeals court will reach in overturning his conviction. And while this scenario might sound like a pipe dream, Bryce Roan believes he has a shot — thanks to the recent acquittal of a roommate amid a finding that the prosecution failed to disclose evidence that could have helped him.

Roan, then a senior airman, had been stationed at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas, in summer 2021 and was living off-base with two other airmen in his unit, 19th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron. When their unit ordered a urinalysis on July 7, Roan and his roommate, Staff Sgt. Nikkolas Wolf, both tested positive for a cocaine metabolite: Roan at 574 nanograms per milliliter, and Wolf at 168, closer to the positive cutoff of 100 ng/mL.

The two airmen were charged, and in Dec 2021, Roan was convicted and sentenced to hard labor without confinement for three months, demotion to the rank of E-2 and a reprimand.

The plot twist came a month later, when Wolf, facing similar charges, had his case postponed by the Air Force’s trial judiciary. According to a January 2022 order published by military judge Col. Julie Pitvorec, Wolf had expressed during an interview with the Air Force Security Office of Investigations that a supplement might be to blame.

“I have no idea, why would I — I take pre-workout, I don’t know if that could make me pop,” Wolf said, according to the order. “My roommate brought [the pre-workout] back from Africa. I ran out of mine and took his.”

That information prompted Little Rock’s top legal officer to direct SFOI to investigate further.

Interviews would reveal the pre-workout in question was manufactured by “Blackstone Labs” and may have contained a stimulant called dimethylhexylamine, or DHMA.

The investigator, according to the order, made queries with the Drug Demand Reduction Program and received a banned substances list and the names of two medical review officers who could talk about the possibility of false positives. But from there, the order states, the trail went cold.

“[The SFOI investigator] did not document this conversation or any of the investigative steps in his attempt to establish whether the pre-workout could cause a positive result for the metabolite of cocaine,” Pitvorec wrote.

While the investigator stated he believed he spoke with one of the recommended officers, he didn’t take any notes or document the interaction, the order states. Pitvorec also detailed that the same investigator deleted the third roommate’s electronic case file and destroyed the hard copy.

The judge’s ruling called the prosecution’s handling of evidence and notifications “grossly negligent,” but said the case didn’t need to be dismissed as long as more time could be given to the defense to evaluate all evidence.

But during his eventual court-martial in May 2022, Wolf was acquitted based on the suspicions of tainted pre-workout initially raised, according to legal documents and Roan’s attorney, Annie Morgan, of the Law Offices of David Sheldon.

“The only fundamental difference between these two cases is, Wolf had access to this potentially exculpatory information in the preparation of his defense,” she said. “And that is what Airman Roan was fundamentally deprived of, was the ability to mount a defense.”

Last January, however, the Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals denied Roan’s appeal based on Wolf’s acquittal, saying that Roan had had access to the initial SFOI investigation report on Wolf, but did not present any evidence to support the theory that the drug pop had been a false positive.

But on Sept. 19, 2024, the highest military appeals court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, went another way, granting review of the case to investigate whether the lower court’s findings that withheld evidence did not affect Roan’s case and that his rights were not violated within the scope of existing law and precedent.

Now, according to Morgan, CAAF is expected to hear arguments in the case Feb. 26. In their most recent brief filed Jan. 13, Roan’s legal team argues that the prosecution missed its opportunity to rule out suspicious pre-workout as the cause of the drug bust.

“While [the government] complains that there is no evidence that [Wolf’s] pre-workout supplement contained DMHA, that is a government-created problem,” the 31-page brief states. “After learning that [the third roommate] possessed questionable pre-workout powder in September 2021, investigators failed to examine, seize, or test the supplement. The government should not now benefit from their investigator’s incompetence.”

Roan, who left the Air Force in July 2021 and is now working as a technician at a major automobile company, told Military Times that he felt his inexperience with the military legal system hindered him in mounting an effective defense at court-martial. While Roan, 25, did not comment on the details of the case on the advice of his lawyers, he said he loved and missed the military.

“I have all my military clothes hung up in the closet, and when I see them, I literally think about it every single day,” he said.

“I just want the wrongs to be righted.”