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Hair Drug Testing

If you're not white, beware the new drug tests

Althea Jones, an African-American mother of two, always wanted to go to police school. "It was my lifelong dream to be a police officer, ever since I was a little girl," she says. When she applied for admission to the Chicago Police Academy, it requested a sample of her hair, which it sent to Psychemedics, the largest hair-testing company in the country. The results came back positive for drug use.

"I was shocked. I couldn't believe it," says Jones. "I don't even smoke or drink. I was heartbroken by this." She was denied admission to the academy and is now a criminal justice major at Chicago State University.

Adrian McClure, an African-American woman, was also keen on a career with the Chicago police department. When she was a senior in college in 1997, she submitted a hair sample to the academy, which sent it to the Psychemedics Corporation. Her test came back positive, too. She says she tried to explain that it was an error and requested a new test, but was rebuffed. "Everybody knows I don't use drugs," McClure says. "This thing has a hold of me. They have shattered me."

Last August, Althea Jones and Adrian McClure, along with six other Chicago African-Americans who say they received erroneous hair test results when applying for the Police Academy, filed complaints of racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The complaints are currently under investigation, and the group is considering suing both the city of Chicago and Psychemedics.

Jones and McClure are just two of many who have lost out as a result of hair testing. Numerous scientific studies have shown hair testing to be inaccurate and unreliable. And the procedure appears to give false positives disproportionately to African-Americans. Nevertheless, use of hair tests is expanding nationwide. Psychemedics reports that business is booming. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm more than doubled sales of its hair test between 1993 and 1997, and in 1997 The Boston Globe named Psychemedics one of the "Top Fifty Growth Companies" of Massachusetts. "The total annual market for drug testing in the United States has been estimated at between $500 and $600 million, and is growing fast," says Psychemedics CEO Raymond C. Kubacki Jr.

Psychemedics services 1,400 businesses that use hair testing on their employees and job applicants. These include General Motors, Anheuser Busch, BMW, Rubbermaid, and Steelcase Corporation. The company is also conducting hair tests for forty to fifty schools, five Federal Reserve banks, and the police departments of New York City, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco.

Whites and blacks have complained about the tests.

Three Police Academy members were given hair tests in New York City as part of their application to the police department. The three Caucasian men claim that they did not take drugs and that the test was flawed. Two of the men had clean urine tests within months prior to the New York police department test. To bolster their assertions, these two men sent hair samples off for a second test to Laboratory Corporation of America and Metropolitan Drug Screening. According to Peter Coddington, an attorney retained by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to represent the men, the tests from the other labs produced opposite results. "They were clean," he said.

"It is quite clear that the police got the wrong results, either through the mishandling of the samples or through the laboratory techniques," says Coddington. "My clients should be reinstated, based on the contradictory tests." Coddington says that the men's lives have been devastated. "There is no question that they don't use drugs. They are three clean-cut, all-American boys. It was their lifetime goal to become police officers, and two of them are from police families. Now their whole lives are on hold."

New York attorney Regina Felton is representing a group of nine police officers, all African-American, dismissed in 1996 due to a positive Psychemedics hair test. All nine had random urinalysis tests throughout their two-year probationary period, which were negative. According to court transcripts, one of Felton's clients sent her hair to National Medical Services within three weeks after the New York Police Department sent her hair sample to Psychemedics. As in the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association cases, the test came back positive from Psychemedics and negative from National Medical Services.

Felton's clients appeared at hearings to seek unemployment compensation from the New York Department of Labor.

Ann Marie Gordon, the Director of Quality Assurance from Psychemedics, testified in each case as the expert on the accuracy of hair testing. As a result, the dismissed officers are not receiving any unemployment compensation. "The person who testified as the expert actually has a proprietary interest in Psychemedics," says Felton. "This person works for Psychemedics, and if she doesn't testify appropriately, she may not have a job."

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Transportation, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and the Society of Forensic Toxicologists (the preeminent professional association in the field of drug testing) all raise serious questions about the accuracy of hair testing. "The consensus of scientific opinion is that there are still too many unanswered questions for [hair analysis] to be used in employment situations," said Edward Cone, the National Institute of Drug Abuse's leading researcher on the test, in June 1998. In a recent interview, Cone said that hair testing "is not ready for use yet, where people's lives are at stake."

The Society of Forensic Toxicologists stands by its 1990 report, which said: "The use of hair analysis for employees and pre-employment drug testing is premature and cannot be supported by the current information on hair analysis for drugs of abuse."

According to a 1996 letter from Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala to the U.S. Senate, her agency "has not approved the use of hair testing for drags of abuse." Shalala stated that "the available research suggests there are significant scientific and procedural concerns that must be addressed," and that these problems "make it impossible for us to recommend at this time its use in the federal program."

D. Bruce Burlington, a medical doctor who is director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, spoke before the House Committee on Commerce on July 23, 1998. "Many scientific questions remain ... about the effectiveness of hair testing for detecting drug use," he said. "The agency [FDA] has not been presented with adequate independent data on the effectiveness of such tests."

Some of the tests appear to give false positives to people who don't consume drugs. More disturbing yet, test results appear to vary according to ethnicity. "Dark hair, blond hair, and dyed hair react differently [from each other], thus creating questions of equity among ethnic groups and genders," Burlington testified.

A U.S. Navy study released by the National Institute of Drug Abuse in 1995 shows that the dark, coarse hair of many African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians is more likely to retain external contamination, such as drug residues absorbed from the environment. Since these residues can be absorbed into hair even when they are not ingested, these groups could face a greater chance of error when subjected to the test. The issue of external contamination is particularly serious for police officers, who may be exposed to drugs during day-to-day law-enforcement operations.

A 1997 study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse supports the Navy's study, stating that "significantly greater nonspecific and specific radioligand binding occurred in dark colored hair compared to light hair." It concludes: "There may be significant ethnic bias in hair testing for cocaine." National Institute of Drug Abuse scientists showed in May 1998 that melanin is the most likely binding site for cocaine in human hair. The study found that cocaine binding was greater "in male Africoid hair than in female Africoid hair and in all Caucasoid hair types."

More recently, Douglas Rollins, director of the Center for Human Toxicology at the University of Utah, gave equal amounts of drugs to rats with black hair and white hair. He found that the black hair retained the drugs at a rate up to fifty times higher than the white hair. He is beginning comparable studies on humans.

William Minot, director of marketing communications at Psychemedics Corporation, says his company is "very conscious" about concerns that a person's race may affect the outcome of the test. The current test, he says, is "fail-proof" because Psychemedics extracts all the melanin from the hair before testing it. Minot says that hair samples are washed thoroughly to remove the hair surface, a procedure that also totally removes any external environmental contaminants before testing.

But the March/April 1998 issue of the Journal of Analytical Toxicology reported that scientists studied the effect on the hair of cocaine users when the melanin was removed. By measuring the cocaine content of the hair both with and without the melanin, the scientists observed that "removal of melanin from hair digests by centrifugation does not eliminate hair color bias when interpreting cocaine concentrations."

Psychemedics's corporate profile claims that its "no-nonsense" hair test is "five to ten times more effective at detecting drug abusers than urinalysis." But Psychemedics, like other hair-testing companies, provides little in the way of hard evidence to support such assertions.

Psychemedics has refused to disclose its testing and analysis procedures to the scientific community, says Leo Cangianelli, who headed the U.S. Navy drug testing division from 1980 to 1990 and is currently vice president of the Walsh Group, a research firm that studies drug and alcohol testing. This makes the hair test difficult for scientists to replicate and makes it almost impossible to establish a system of quality assurance for hair testing, Cangianelli says. And no hair testing labs have been federally certified, according to Burlington.

Sergeant Duane Adens, an African-American father of five, was a fourteen-year employee of the Pentagon. Adens was less than six years away from retirement and had received the highest possible rating for overall performance in his last job evaluation when his life was turned upside down by a drug test.

In October 1996, two agents from the Army's Criminal Investigation Division called Adens to a meeting and asked him to testify against an associate of his, who the agents said was stealing and selling computers. Adens says he told them he could not do this, since he had no knowledge of the crimes. "The agent told me that I was obstructing justice and they would play hardball with me," recalls Adens. He says one of the agents then accused him of using drugs and threatened him with the loss of his Pentagon job. At that point, the agent asked Adens to provide him with a sample of his body hair, which he intended to have tested for drugs. Adens refused to provide the hair, and following the suggestion of his commander, the Army conducted a urine test on him the next day. That test came back negative.

In January 1997, two new agents came to Adens's home. "They told me they had a warrant," says Adens. This time, Adens's attorney advised him to provide the hair. They took Adens to a hospital and laid him on a table. One of the agents asked him if he would prefer the hair to be taken from his head or his pubic area. When Adens requested that it be taken from his head, the agent "said he would take it from my pubic area anyway so as not to mess up my haircut," says Adens, who believes the agent intended to humiliate him. A medical doctor removed the pubic hair, which the agent put in a small box in his pocket. After a delay of twenty days and without Adens signing off on the hair to identify it as his own--in violation of custody regulations--the hair was sent to National Medical Services in Willowborough, Pennsylvania. The results came back positive.

Adens was stunned. He says he does not use drugs and had not been exposed to environmental contaminants. Seven urinalysis tests he had taken over the course of a year and a half--most of them random tests required by the military--all came back negative. Adens took these tests between October 1996 and May 1998. He also did more tests once he knew the Army's Criminal Investigation Division was after him and can document the negative results.

Adens was brought before an Army court martial. He and his new attorney, Charles Gittins, requested a DNA test to verify the identity of the hair, which Adens believes was not even his. The U.S. Army denied his request. Because of the hair-test results, Sergeant Adens received a bad conduct discharge in July 1998.

Representative Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, has taken up the issue. In a July 22, 1998, letter to Secretary of Defense William Cohen, McKinney told the Secretary that the case of Sergeant Adens "has the potential to trigger hearings before the House National Security Committee" and that she is "exploring a possible legislative remedy to prohibit human hair testing for drugs in the military" until guidelines are established. "Hair testing has been proven by forensic toxicologists to be racially biased," she wrote.

McKinney received a response to her inquiry from Under Secretary of Defense Rudy de Leon on October 1. He reported that the Army had "contracted for hair analysis in six cases in the last two years involving five African-American subjects." In response to McKinney's letter, de Leon responded, "I understand your concern that hair color and other factors may affect hair absorption and extraction rates, and the ability of the test to detect the presence of illegal drugs. While this does not invalidate test results, DOD does not plan to use these tests in administrative drug testing programs until this matter is thoroughly studied and adequately addressed."

Representative Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, wrote to the Army in behalf of Adens in September. Rangel's personal assistant Albert Becker wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Aaron B. Hayes: "Something is wrong with our military system of equal justice when an individual can pass all the required blood tests on Monday and fail the same procedure on Tuesday using a method that has not been approved by a branch of the federal government (the FDA). For a soldier to lose his self-esteem, family and military respect is a bit too much based on the strength of a body hair." Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Jeanne Fites declined to comment on the specifics of the Adens case.

The issue of hair testing has recently been brought to the House Judiciary Committee through the office of ranking committee member John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan. Conyers is concerned about the ethnic bias of the hair test, and Judiciary Committee staff members are looking into it.

Adens was removed from his position at the Pentagon at the beginning of his ordeal. He says he has been demoted to "doing odds and ends jobs like driving for people, filing, office work.... I've tried through my contacts to get some other jobs in the military, but they don't want to touch me at this point." Since his removal, Adens has missed out on two promotions that would have increased his income substantially. As soon as the Army approves the transcript of his case, he will be put on involuntary leave, which means he will lose his job and his government-subsidized home.

"One of the things that really, really bothers me is that this is a federal conviction," says Adens. "I will never be able to get a good job. I lose my voting rights. Something I worked hard at for fourteen years is all going to be taken away from me--for no reason at all."

Leslie Kean and Dennis Bernstein are the co-authors of the soon-to-be-released book "Henry Hyde's Moral Universe: Where More than Time and Space Are Warped" (Common Courage Press).

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