MySQL MD5 LONGTEXT with Binary Data - mysql

Question

Is there a way to get the md5 hash of a binary value that's stored in a MySQL LONGTEXT field?
Example:
CREATE TABLE table_name (
data_path VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL;
data_column LONGTEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,
PRIMARY KEY (path)
)
Then in application code (example PHP):
function insert($path) {
// ...
$raw_file_data = file_get_contents($path);
$stmt = $dbh->prepare(
"INSERT INTO REGISTRY (data_path, data_column) VALUES (:path, :data)"
);
$stmt->bindParam('path', $path);
$stmt->bindParam('data', $raw_file_data);
$stmt->execute();
// ...
}
insert('/path/to/binary_file.jpg');
insert('/path/to/text_file.text');
Later, we query the md5 hashes of the inserted rows:
SELECT md5(data_column) WHERE data_path = '/path/to/binary_file.jpg';
SELECT md5(data_column) WHERE data_path = '/path/to/text_file.txt';
However hashes from MySQL do not match the md5sum of the actual files for any non-plaintext files.
md5sum /path/to/binary_file.jpg # does not match!
md5sum /path/to/text_file.txt # matches!
As far as I understand this has to do with the way MySQL will encode the data for the column's character set.
I also understand this field should be a binary field (BLOB, LONGBLOG, etc.) but this is in a legacy system which uses the same table to store binary and text files and depends on being able to search those text files.
My question is: Is there a way to get the md5 hash of the binary value of what is stored in the data_column?