Health Care Info For You

Hair drug testing - widely accepted in courts

Testing for drugs and in particular hair drug testing is becoming much more commonplace, particularly in the US, UK and the EU. This method of drug testing has a significant advantage over other detection methods such as saliva tests, urine tests and blood tests, in that it provides a far wider time frame for which drugs can be detected. (Referred to as the detection window). It is possible to detect drugs for several months - even years if the hair has been allowed to grow for that amount of time, the test requires 3 inches of hair one inch representing 30 days. Most commonly however, tests require 90 day detection (thats 3 inches of hair): This compares to typically 4-5 days for urine based testing (or in chronic cases of marijuana misuse, 28 days)

Approximately fifty hair follicles are needed for successful drug hair testing. This is about the thickness of the end of a shoelace, meaning that most people would show no obvious signs that a sample had been taken unless their hair is particularly short.

The cost of hair testing is greater than urine based tests - which are the only other viable method of achieving top-quality test results. Testing using blood is not widely available partly due to the challenges in taking a sample in the first instance.

A typical hair drugs test costs around £60-£70 for preparation of the sample (which involves turning the hair from a solid to a liquid) and then a further £40-50 per drug type required for detection. This compares to an approximate charge of £60-75 for laboratory testing of urine which will detect substances of misuse across all drug classes.

The biggest question asked of course is how to pass a hair drug test. Very simply, there is only one definite way in which to guarantee this - Don’t take drugs!