Drugs By The Hair Prominent Testing For Illegal Substances Has Its Pros And Cons.

An increasingly popular test for drug abuse, based on the examination of hair strands for traces of narcotics, identifies far more users than standard urine tests, federal authorities agree.

However, many people worry that hair-based tests sometimes finger innocent subjects, such as children of drug abusers or police assigned to narcotics details, who can be exposed to drugs without taking them. There also is concern that hair tests turn up disproportionate numbers of non-Caucasians. That’s because some researchers have found that traces of drugs last longer in thick, dark hair than thin, light-colored hair.

“The scope of drug testing is expanding dramatically, and with expanding hair testing, the likelihood of bias will increase, too. It’s a major problem,” warned J. Michael Walsh, executive director of the President’s Drug Advisory Council under Presidents Reagan and Bush and now a consultant to the urinalysis industry.

The potential effects are wide-ranging. About 20 million Americans undergo drug tests each year, according to the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace, a Washington-based alliance of drug test proponents. The majority are job applicants without rights of appeal.

The U.S. military tests 1 million recruits and personnel a year. Pilots, bus drivers and truckers all are tested under Department of Transportation regulations, as are nuclear reactor operators and others in safety-sensitive positions regulated by the Department of Energy.

Drug testing also has grown commonplace in child-custody cases, probation and parole monitoring and decisions about welfare and public housing eligibility. Schools are getting on board, too. The New Jersey School Board Association, for example, recently endorsed random testing of students, and Dade County, Fla., schools allow parents to volunteer their children for tests. Home drug-test kits for worried parents and loved ones are widely available through the Internet, toll-free telephone numbers and pharmacies.

About 80 percent of companies that test for drugs rely solely on urine, and only 2 percent use hair. One reason is legality. Urine tests have universal acceptance in courts, while skepticism about the science behind hair tests persists. The other reason is politics. Employers, state regulators and courts want a green light from federal public-health experts before they go ahead with hair testing. And the regulators remain skeptical.

To date, “hair analysis for the presence of drugs is unproven, unsupported by scientific literature or controlled trials,” Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Sharon Snider said. “Hair testing may turn out to have a complementary role in workplace testing,” said Robert Stevenson, deputy director of the Workplace Programs Division of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. “But we have yet to resolve remaining questions about its fairness and the ability to interpret results consistently.”

Still, hair tests are becoming more popular. That’s partly because the tests turn up more drug users than urinalysis and counter some of urine testing’s shortcomings. Also important are sustained lobbying and marketing efforts by Psychemedics Corp. of Cambridge, Mass, which dominates the hair-testing market.

A decade ago, Psychemedics’ biggest customers were Nevada casinos. Today, they include Anheuser-Busch, the Federal Reserve System and General Motors.

Florida entrepreneur H. Wayne Huizenga, founder of Blockbuster Entertainment, gets much of the credit. He led a group of investors that bought Psychemedics out of debt in 1989. With Blockbuster as a mainstay customer, the firm grew to more than 750 clients, according to its 1996 Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

In that year, Florida legislators, pushed by Huizenga’s lobbyist, approved hair testing in the state. The law grandfathered Psychemedics’ patented hair-testing process and set high hurdles for future competitors. By the end of 1997, according to company general counsel William Thistle, Psychemedics had 1,000 clients.

In Washington, Psychemedics has won strong support among congressional Republicans for federal endorsement of hair testing. (The company spent $200,000 on congressional lobbying last year, lobbying records show.) But federal health scientists remain skeptical.

Thistle and other Psychemedics executives insist patented methods are unbiased and produce no “false positives” from innocent drug exposure. If hair testing were to supplant urine testing for drugs, Thistle ventured in an interview, from three to 10 times more illicit drug users would be caught.

The result could be a new epoch in the nation’s drug war history: “Drug users wouldn’t be employed,” Thistle said flatly, “or they’d be in rehabilitation programs.” There’s no question the hair test is a tougher cop.

Using scheduled urine tests, the New York Police Department caught one drug abuser in seven years, according to a published report. In the first 18 months of random hair tests by Psychemedics, more than 30 NYPD employees tested positive. In another comparison, involving 774 job applicants to Steelcase Corp., a Michigan furniture maker, urinalysis tests were 2.7 percent positive. Psychemedics hair tests on the same applicants were 18 percent positive.

But hair testing also has its flaws. It can’t catch recent drug use the way urine tests can because traces of ingested drugs take about five to seven days to show up in hair. On the other hand, hair tests can detect drug use within a 90-day period. The procedure entails meticulous lab analyses of 1-1/2-inch snippets taken from the crown of the head close to the scalp.

“We can’t see what’s immediate,” said Psychemedics general counsel Thistle, “and they can’t see what’s NOT immediate.” Hair and urine tests are complementary in another way, researchers say: Urine tests catch marijuana easily and cocaine and heroin with great difficulty. Hair tests do just the opposite.

Using both tests seems logical, but hair testing will first have to overcome the doubts of scientists like David Kidwell of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. He’s found that young children of cocaine-consuming mothers often test positive for cocaine in hair tests.

Psychemedics insists the children ingested the drug somehow. But Kidwell theorizes that the minute traces of cocaine necessary for a positive test adhered to the children’s fingers, or their mothers’, and were carried inside hair follicles in solution with sweat.

In another recent government-sponsored study, researchers at the University of Utah’s Center for Human Toxicology injected piebald rats, which have patches of light and dark hair, with codeine, a mild opiate. Codeine concentrations in the rats’ dark hair were 44 times higher than in their light hair.

In humans as well, “black hair seems to accumulate far more cocaine than light-brown or blond hair,” said Edward J. Cone, chief of the chemistry and drug metabolism section of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. There’s a “good possibility,” Cone continued, that “ethnic groups with dark hair are going to test positive for the drug more often.”

Thistle contended that Psychemedics’ patented test procedure had made bias “a nonissue.” For government researchers, however, patents are part of the problem: They can’t reproduce Psychemedics’ results because the company won’t share the process openly.