Firms Turn to Hair Test to Check Prospective Employees for Drug Use.

By Diane E. Lewis, The Boston Globe Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Dec. 15--Employers nowadays want a strand of your hair rather than a cup of your urine.

The Boston Police Department changed to hair testing a year ago. So did Illinois-based Kraft Foods.

"We felt the hair test was a much better testing methodology," said Kraft Foods spokeswoman Kathy Kanuth.

Even the federal government, which still relies heavily on urine tests, is considering changing its regulations and procedures to include hair and other testing methods. Final regulations are expected in about 18 months. One reason for the switch is that employers are facing a new industry with an odd mandate: help workers beat urine tests.

Sold mainly through the Internet and publications like High Times, the products touted by this cottage industry have names like Clear Choice, Urine Aid, and Urine Luck. The merchandise runs from additives that mask illegal substances to a fake phallus with a pouch to hold clean urine.

But making the switch from urine to hair testing might not be easy. Labor unions, privacy advocates, and groups like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, would likely denounce a governmental switch because of potential privacy violations. NORML also argues that hair testing could discriminate against African-Americans and pregnant women, raising legal concerns.

Others wonder whether there are enough labs to support widespread use of hair tests by government contractors.

"There are 50 to 60 certified laboratories that do nothing else but urine tests and there are thousands of sites to collect urine samples," said Dr. Robert Swotinsky, director of occupational health at Fallon Clinic in Worcester. There are now only two major laboratories that test hair, Swotinsky said.

One of the labs is owned and operated by Cambridge-based Psychemedics Corp. It screens hair samples for cocaine, heroine, PCP's, Ecstasy, and marijuana.

Typically, the hair is clipped at an occupational medical center, collection site, or the workplace by a trained individual. The hair is placed in a container, sealed, and shipped to Psychemedic's laboratory in California.

There, technicians liquify it and test for metabolites, substances the body produces while processing drugs. In most cases, test results are returned within 48 hours.

Psychemedics credits employer angst over beat-the-test strategies with boosting company sales to $16 million in 2002, up from $2 million a decade earlier.

"In 1987, when we were just getting started, we made nothing in the first few years," said Ray Kubacki, president and chief executive. "We were just trying to get our tests together. Now, we're adding between 250 and 270 clients per year. Over the last three years, we added 800 clients and the majority of them were employers who wanted to switch from urine to hair testing."

Today, the company has 2,600 clients, up from 200 in 1991.

Not all employers are switching -- or even drug testing. The sluggish economy and declines in hiring budgets caused firms that had no critical reason to test workers to curtail the practice. Today, 67 percent of US companies conduct drug tests, reports the American Management Association. Of those, 20 percent test both hair and urine and 30 percent test saliva. The remainder only test urine, said Laura Shelton, executive director of the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association.

The 1,100-member group has asked the US Department of Transportation to require hair testing as an alternative to the standard urine test. The organization, a vocal representative of the $4 billion drug testing industry, believes federal adoption of alternatives like hair screening would prompt private employers to do the same.

Why bother? Shelton contends hair and saliva testing would put firms that help workers cheat out of business because it's harder to mask drugs in hair than it is in urine. Even a new crop of shampoos that offer to wash away signs of drug use by stripping the hair can't prevent labs from detecting illegal substances in the hair shaft, she said.

The reason: Drugs are absorbed into the hair follicle and shampoos only touch the outer layer of the hair strand. From the follicle, drug traces are deposited into the center of each hair strand, forming a history of usage that can remain in hair from months to years, depending on hair length.

"The longer the piece of hair, the longer the history of drug use," said Dick Etter, vice president of Northwest Toxicology, a urine and hair testing firm. "Deposits of drugs in hair can go through the entire length of hair, possibly for years. But, for practical purposes, the hair sample is collected from close to the scalp and that will show drug use from three to six months."

What happens if the worker is bald? "You can collect hair from other parts of the body, including chest hair, underarm hair, even leg hair," said Shelton. "If you have no body hair, then you do not get a hair test. You are switched to a saliva test instead."

By contrast, urine tests offer a shorter history of drug use because the illegal substance remains in the system for approximately three days. And urine test results can be "beaten" by abstaining from drug use for several days or drinking large quantities of water, said Dr. Brian Linder, corporate medical director at Houston-based Marathon Oil Co.

At Gillette Co. in Boston, hair tests that come back positive are retested using an even more sophisticated technique to confirm the initial analysis, said. Dr. J. Brooks Watt, director of corporate medical services. He said Gillette switched to hair testing because the screen hones in on "consistent, routine, and significant drug use." That troubles Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the NORML Foundation. He said workers who have turned their lives around could be penalized for activity they are no longer engaged in because prior usage showed up in hair tests. St. Pierre also agrued that the tests could garner misleading results from African-Americans, graying adults, and pregnant women.

"With race, there is a difference in the type of oils and sheens that are naturally produced in the hair of different ethnic groups," said St. Pierre. "African-American hair, for example, could produce minerals that are not common in Caucasions, especially very white people with thin hair. The workers' hair type could cause a drug to remain in the hair significantly longer or for shorter periods of time.

NORML also contends that a pregnant woman could test positive even though she has never used drugs. "When a woman conceives, her body generates a whole series of different enzymes that could impact the results of a hair test," said St. Pierre. Entrepreneur Dennis Catalano, cofounder of Puck Technology, said he has privacy concerns. Catalano's California-based company sells a $150 prosthetic penis that comes with a pouch to hold clean urine and tubing to dispense it. The device is strapped around the waist with a belt. Called The Whizzinator, it was "designed to keep your bodily fluids out of the hands of people who should not have it and preserve privacy as much as we can today," he said in a phone interview.

"There are hundreds of things besides drugs that can be deduced from hair testing information, including genetic information, health information, or any use of psychotropic drugs for mental illness," Catlano said.

Northwest Toxicology's Etter said both labs and employers are barred from collecting and dispensing private medical information about workers. Under federal law, he said, labs cannot use hair, urine, or saliva samples to collect genetic or medical information. As for St. Pierre's argument that hair tests are potentially discriminatory, Shelton said: "The texture of your hair has no bearing on the test. . . . Also, the enzymes in pregnant women wouldn't be a factor because the tests are only looking for specific enzymes that are formed when the body metabolizes drugs."

To see more of The Boston Globe, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.boston.com/globe

(c) 2003, The Boston Globe. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

KFT, G,