Thanks to President Reagan, drug tests are now commonplace when applying for jobs, and while working in others. A US Navy aircraft crashed on the deck of the USS Nimitz in 1981, taking some crewmembers with it. As a result he signed an executive order mandating drugs testing for all federal employees.
Shortly after, the private sector was let in on the act and permitted to perform drug testing on job applicants as part of the application process. Now over 84% of employers in the United States have some kind of drug testing process in place. Schools and colleges are also beginning to implement drug testing of their own, and you can now buy home drug testing kits almost as readily as you can pregnancy testing kits.
A drug test is designed to locate chemical compounds of specific drugs, or the metabolites of them. When a body digests or metabolizes, something, it breaks it down into other chemicals. Specific compounds have specific metabolites, which these tests will detect. The idea of searching for metabolites as well as the drug itself is that it’s evidence of the subject having ingested the drug.
These metabolites are transported by the body and stored in fatty deposits. These are semi-permanent and will only disappear when the body burns the fat for energy. Therefore, the tests can often detect drugs long after the actual event. The detection time varies however between the drugs, and the lifestyle of the person involved.
The tests themselves are no indicator of intent, so they cannot prove that the person voluntarily took drugs, only that they have taken them. While this is a little wooly as far as the law goes, the presence of drugs in a subjects system, whether taken knowingly or not, is enough to deny employment or attract other kinds of censure.
The urine test requires a sample of urine and a test card is applied to it to indicate the presence of any drugs. If the card provides a positive result, the urine is sent for further testing in a laboratory. This test is very reliable but is subject to being fooled by urine substitution or drinking water heavily for a period before the test.
The hair test is another reliable drug testing method. A sample of hair is taken and tested for the same metabolites. As the drug is ingested in the blood, they are deposited into the hair follicle. There is stays until the hair either drops out or is cut off.
The blood test is the most complicated, and expensive drugs test to undertake. It involves the taking of a sample of blood by a doctor or nurse and having that blood tested for the metabolites. These are often reserved for court cases, litigation or life insurance policies.
All positive results can be confirmed by using mass spectrometry, which confirms the presence of the compound and the metabolites at the molecular level, and is regarded as absolutely accurate.
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