Concentra Drug Testing
Trying to Outwit Drug Screening - Brief Article It has been said that if there is a demand for a product, chances are someone, somewhere is selling it. Proof positive is what is happening with drug screening and those who want to beat the system. Many companies have instituted drug-testing policies to ensure that their workforce is drug-free. This has created the demand for products designed to help those who would normally fail to pass the tests.
"It's amazing what one can buy to try and beat the drug tests," says David Feinstein, a certified medical review officer with Concentra, Connecticut's largest occupational health care provider, as well as the state's leading center for drug screening. "Anyone can go online and purchase drug-free urine, heaters, and even prosthetics to try and beat the tests. This has forced us in the drug-screening business to become very creative."
One website, for example, sells concentrated urine that is guaranteed to pass any drug test. The same site offers a prosthetic device that allows a man to give a fake urine sample while appearing to be providing a sample from his own bladder.
"When a company sends an employee or prospective employee to us for a drug screening, we send them into a specially equipped bathroom ... and ask them to provide a urine sample," Feinstein notes. "Our bathrooms are not typical because we've prepared them especially to help prevent adulteration."
One precaution Concentra takes is that, when the test subject enters the testing area, a medical attendant flicks a switch on the outside of the room to shut off the water supply to the toilet and sink. This prevents the person from trying to dilute the sample with tap water. The company also uses a blue coloring tablet in the toilet tank so that, if a person tries to mix toilet water with the sample, the result is a greenish liquid. "There a misconception that using water to dilute a urine sample will fool the drug test," Feinstein explains. "The reason we shut the water is so that the candidate is discouraged from trying to tamper with the tests. We've even seen some candidates go so far as to drink a gallon of water before coming in for a test in hopes of diluting their sample.... We tell them to go home and reschedule the test because we can tell when the sample is diluted."
Another factor to consider when administering tests is the temperature of the sample. Since the urine is supposed to be coming from inside the body, it should be body temperature. Mail-order specimens will not be warm enough to pass the test. "There is a temperature gauge on the side of the cup that allows us to make sure that the sample registers between 90 and 100 degrees," Feinstein points out. "Some of the mail order houses sell warmers which bring the fake sample up to temperature, but the pads either heat the sample too much or too little. Either way, we can tell."
Feinstein maintains that, in his days of testing, he has seen it all. Whether it was the person who brought some bleach to pour into the sample cup in hopes that it would fool the test ("It just turned it foamy and we told him he should go to the hospital immediately") to people who have taken multitudes of vitamins and health supplements in hopes of passing ("Some chemicals cause irregular readings in the tests, but never give a false result").
Scientists have recently devised an even-more-foolproof test that not only determines if candidates have used drugs in the past 72 hours, but if they have done so over the past few months. The new test is conducted not with urine, but with hair. "Unlike the urine test, which can only test for recent use of drugs, the hair test allows us to look back into a person's past few months of possible drug use. This is because when someone uses drugs, the chemicals are absorbed into the skin and stay there for a long period of time. Hair is just another form of skin, and by trimming a sample, we can the send it out to be analyzed for the presence of drug-related chemicals."
Hair testing does have drawbacks. Since it uses newer technology, the cost is much greater than traditional urine tests. There is a cosmetic drawback as well--the doctors must remove a half-inch-wide chunk of hair that is at least an inch long, though the test may be done with other types of body hair.
One other problem with the hair test occurs when the person to be tested is bald. Feinstein remembers one time a person came in for the test and was completely bald, with very little body hair. After some thinking, the doctor ended up trimming some hair from under the armpit. "Any hair will work for the test. So if there is a concern about damaging a nice hair-do, we can grab hair from other places. We can also sometimes use fingernail clippings."
Employers are concerned about their employees using drugs for a number of reasons. Compared with the average worker, recreational drug-users are more than two times more likely to have absences of eight days or more, three times more likely to be late to work, almost four times more likely to injure themselves or others in the workplace, and five times more likely to file a workers' compensation claim. For the small price of a drug test, employers can gain much more security and have that added assurance that they will be able to operate a safer and more efficient workplace.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
|
