Drug testing for hair will be highly accurate and will get back in 3 months approximately, showing any drugs of abuse used in the detection window. However, recognized hair drug testing laboratories, use only 2.5'4 cm of hair and dispose the rest. Some tried to avoid this test by shaving their heads. In such circumstances, body hair can be used as the substitute for testing. As the hair drug testing is more expensive than urine, sweat or saliva testing, many companies consider the benefits to offset the costs. It is even difficult to mask the drugs in this type of drug testing.
What is Hair Drug Testing?
It is an inspection to identify the specific drug usage with a small sample of hair by the person being tested. This test measures the drug molecules and their specific metabolites that are produced only after the drug has been processed by the human body. After the drug is processed, trace amounts of its metabolites are inserted into hair follicle by the bloodstream.
How do drugs get into hair?
After ingesting the drug substance, orally, smoked, or injected, metabolites are produced as the drug is processed by the human body. As these drugs and metabolites circulate in the blood stream, they enter and nourish the hair follicle and are then inserted into the hair strand.
How much hair is needed?
A standard Hair Testing with GC/MS confirmation requires 40+ milligrams of hair or 50 - 70 strands with 1.5 inches of length. The thickness and pigment color of different types of head hair is the basis of this variation.
What Type of Drugs can be detected in a Standard Hair Test?
Usually hair drug test mandates the following five drug classes:
?Marijuana,
?Phencyclidine (PCP),
?Cocaine (Cocaine & Benzoylecgonine),
?Opiates (Codeine, Morphine & 6-Monacteyl Morphine) and
How effective is hair follicle testing in detecting drug usage?
When compared with the other drug testing, hair testing analysis has proven that it is more effective in identifying low-level drug use over an extended period of time, as the other tests are normally out of the bloodstream in within 3-7 days. The detection of marijuana is currently less sensitive than the other drugs in identifying low level drug users, but is considered approximately equal to urinalysis in identifying marijuana users. The drug detection period for hair is limited only by the length of the hair sample and is approximately 90 days for a standard testing.
Hair Drug Testing provides much longer window for detecting the substance. This testing has been proven to be more effective and less invasive than other alternatives. Moreover, it cannot be used if the donor has no hair on their body.
The relevance of drug testing in the workplace has different degrees of variability across the globe. The view of the importance of hair drug testing varies from one country to another. Hair drug testing is more applicable for developed countries that have more stringent laws in relation to the quality of work environment. Among developing countries, the value of drug tests is waning.
The rational for hair drug testing in the workplace is ambiguous even in developed countries like the United States. In terms of monetary loss, the U.S. economy is losing more than US$ 250 billion each year written off as drug abuse cost, including about 500 million lost working days. The lost working days created by drug-abused employees are 66 percent greater than the absences incurred by healthy employees.
While the United States has made parallel studies on the impact of drug abuse in the work place, other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada have also stepped up their efforts in understanding the drug problem. In the UK, between 11 million and 17 million working days are lost each year, costing the UK economy as much as 1.8 billion pounds per year. Drug abuse is highly related to work efficiency in Canada where the economy is losing $400 million in lost productivity. Thus the primacy of hair drug testing in the workplace is more critical in countries looking to cut its economic costs.
Hair drug testing is relatively new in the United States. However, other countries have yet to catch up with this trend especially in applying these drug tests to regulate the workplace.
However, the phenomenon is catching up. UK courts have acknowledged hair drug testing as a basis for irrefutable evidence. Countries such as Belgium and Finland believe that privacy is an indivisible right above the mechanisms of drug testing in the workplace.
Countries in Europe have also experienced increase in demand for drug tests. However, hair drug testing is casted in a negative light. Studies have shown that dark haired individuals are more likely to test positive than light-haired individuals. Therefore, the need to validate such test results by using other methods other than hair drug testing is important especially in Europe where there are ethical issues that is being pushed in the forefront.
The advantage of hair drug testing is longer detection rates as compared to urine drug tests. However, the belief that there is a probability of false positive in hair drug testing can be a cause of concern in nations who value the rights of employees. While drug testing is slowly catching up there are still structural hindrances and cultural values that governs a country’s ethical standards on such issues.
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