A suspected heroin user can’t rely on digestion to avoid prosecution, the Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled Friday.

In a unanimous ruling, the court ordered the reinstatement of a charge of misleading a police officer against Josefa Tejeda, who allegedly devoured a packet of suspected heroin just as Boston police Officer David Crabbe was arresting a friend of Tejeda’s for heroin possession.

“Officer Crabbe observed the defendant . . . pick up the plastic bag and place the item in her mouth,’’ Judge C. Jeffrey Kinder wrote for the three-judge panel. “The bag and its contents were not recovered.’’

Crabbe charged Tejeda with “misleading police’’ under a 2006 state law that makes it a crime to “impede, obstruct, delay, harm, punish, or otherwise interfere with a criminal investigation,’’ the court said. Tejeda was arrested on Oct. 8, 2014, in Roxbury.

But Roxbury Municipal Court Judge David Weingarten concluded “misleading a police officer required some act of deception and that the ingestion of the substance was not misleading conduct’’ and threw out the charge against Tejeda, the court noted.

In its ruling, the Appeals Court said eating the alleged evidence qualified as an attempt to mislead police.

“It was a mischievous act designed to outwit the police by preventing them from seizing the evidence and, ultimately, proving its chemical composition,’’ Kinder wrote.

The court reinstated the charge of misleading police against Tejeda.

“From a practical and common-sense view, it is reasonable to infer that swallowing the suspected heroin was an affirmative act committed for the purpose of interfering with a criminal investigation,’’ Kinder wrote.

The court concluded that when the Legislature created the charge of misleading police in 2006, lawmakers were determined “to arm law enforcement officers with additional tools to combat deliberate interference with criminal investigations and prosecutions, precisely the conduct alleged here.’’

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley’s office now plans to prosecute Tejeda on the misleading police charge, spokesman Jake Wark wrote in an e-mail. “The Appeals Court’s ruling is perfectly appropriate,’’ he wrote, noting that the ruling endorses the legal arguments prosecutors had made. “The decision is consistent with the language and intent of the statute.’’

John R. Ellement can be reached at ellement@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @JREbosglobe.