 Myths about Hair Drug Testing CheatingWelcome to the world of Cheating: Hair drug testing is the method that is used in most of the forensic investigations as secondary methods after Urinalysis i.e. Urine Drug Testing. It has been observed that, out of natural tendency, accused and the suspects try to pass the drug tests by illegitimate or unfair means. As a common practice, they try to cheat on the testing techniques. With an ever increasing “cheat-o-pedia” on the internet, drug abusers get an easy access to “reliable” ways of “fooling” the drug tests! A little bit of “Google-ing” will show you that an easiest way to do so is to contaminate or adulterate the samples by various chemicals or by changing the internally stored drug metabolites by detoxification directly! So, one may adulterate the urine samples, contaminating it by several means, for example, by:
But, in case of Hair Drug Testing techniques, the investigators can ensure themselves of not getting any manipulated samples! This is because of the fact that the drug metabolites are entrapped within the hair cortex, and no one can damage the cortex (Not unless one goes bald!). Some smart people, at times, even try to wash out the drug metabolites stored inside the core shaft of the hair fiber, by cleansing with some shampoos, chemical substances, and other means but these are those people who didn’t Google enough to know that none of this is of any help, because the metabolites are stored in the cortex and all these chemicals act on the surface domain, or at most on the accessible domain and NO such chemical can really reach the inaccessible domain, where exactly the drug metabolites are stored. Although, some chemicals are believed to penetrate into the cortex and destroy the metabolites by dissolving them (sadly, we are not going to name these chemicals!), but these reports have not been validated with any substantiated results! To further dismay of drug abusers, soaking hair in a drug solution or in any detoxifying agent has been proved to cause minimal contamination to the inaccessible domain. Some really intelligent people may try to “explain” by citing the usage of some over-the-counter permitted drugs, which can cause a false positive in the urinalysis! But this thing can be taken care of in the hair drug test, as after the drug screening, investigators can precisely look for the particular drugs using various high-throughput chromatographic techniques viz. TLC, HPLC, LC, GC, GC-MS or radio-immuno assays like EMIT, ELISA & RIA. Some geniuses may also try to detoxify the drugs ingested. Now this can really save their skin as far as a hair test is concerned. This may not be able to help them with urine drug test because in the urine test, drug is shown up in the urine within a very short duration after the drug is taken in. But, with hair drug test, this may really “fool” the test because in the case of hairs, a drug is shown up in the cortex only after 4-5 days of administration. So, one can take advantage and detoxify the metabolites within that duration and pass out in flying colors! Moral of the Story: If you are an abuser & if you are going to live through both hair & urine drug tests simultaneously, don’t search further, you have got No Chance of escaping! |
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