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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Feds Ok First Home Drug Test Non-Prescription Kit Provides New Weapon In War On Drugs

Washington Post

Parents who suspect their children are using drugs soon will be able to test them at home.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Tuesday the first drug test available without a prescription. The new kit, “Dr. Brown’s Home Drug Testing System,” tests urine for the presence of marijuana, PCP, amphetamines, cocaine, heroin, codeine and morphine.

The product “gives parents another option to consider to help ensure that their children remain drug-free,” Donna E. Shalala, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement Tuesday. Shalala noted that parents should talk with their children about drug abuse directly.

The approval comes four months after the FDA and the Clinton administration came under fire in Congress over the agency’s attempts to restrict distribution of a similar product.

The “Dr. Brown” of the test kit name is Dr. J. Theodore Brown, a clinical psychologist with a background in treating substance abuse. Brown, who formed Personal Health and Hygiene Inc., based in Silver Spring, Md., to market the product, said Tuesday he hopes to have the kits on the market within six weeks and expects to charge around $30 for it. Users should expect results from one to three days after the lab receives the sample, Brown said.

“It’s not like we invented the airplane, but I think it’s a meaningful product,” he said. “I think it’s good for America.”

Privacy advocates, however, have long said that the easy availability of a drug test kit could violate the rights of those tested, whether in schools or the home.

Steven B. Duke of Yale Law School said he was “a little concerned about whether it’s going to be employed in schools and other places.” But he added that “one can hardly object categorically to its availability within the family. … Parents have always been able to snoop on their children, and this gives them another means of doing so.” Still, Duke said, the availability of such a test “doesn’t mean necessarily that it should be employed.”

Brown said his company has addressed those concerns. “We do everything we possibly can in the instructions, and all of the materials we will be providing to discourage any coerciveness or punitive behavior.”

The new system is not a home diagnostic kit like those commonly available for pregnancy testing. Instead, it is a home collection kit. Samples are sent to a laboratory, which screens them for drugs, provides information about interpreting the results and offers referrals for drug abuse counseling.