As more employers look for ways to keep habitual drug users from their businesses, hair follicle testing or simply “testing hair for drugs”, is becoming more and more popular. There are several reasons for this. First, a hair analysis done at 90-day increments allows for less testing and reduces the numbers of times an employee must submit to a drug screening. It appears to be far more resistant to the tampering that plagues urine-based testing schemes.
Urine is much more susceptible to many ploys to pass a drug screen by an employee. Herbal concoctions, either drank or put into the urine itself and super-hydration by some users in an attempt to “flush” the drug from their system have some sporadic success. Of course, it is also possible for drug-contaminated urine to be substituted with “clean” urine from a willing donor. (They can often be found on Craigslist, as an example, selling drug-free urine.)For all of these reasons, hair analysis puts up a much higher bar for a drug user to get over.
The bar gets higher for these simple reasons:
1. The employee cannot trade his or her hair for someone else’s just for the test.
2. The employee cannot “change” their hair by placing anything in or on the sample.
3. The applicant cannot eat or drink anything that will alter a hair sample enough to change a test outcome.
Why test hair for drugs?
Hair can retain the “footprint” of drugs for up to 90 days. This means that behavior can be tracked for a much longer and more significant amount of time than just the few minutes or days before a urine or blood sample.
Where is hair analysis not useful or appropriate?
After an accident is the usual answer to this question. Hair testing detects drug use over a long period of time, up to 90 days before a sample is taken for testing. For this reason, urine and/or blood sampling is the appropriate method to test for drug use after an accident.
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