Testing Teens

Desperate parents dissatisfied with old-school ways of trying to tell whether their kids are doing drugs – rifling through their drawers, smelling their breath, searching their eyes – are now instead demanding proof. They’re dragging their teens to drug testing labs and buying home testing kits by the case over the Internet.

“I tell my daughter if you want to go out tonight you’re going to pee in a cup first,” said Suzanne Fugarino, whose 17-year-old daughter was expelled from high school last fall after bringing a crack pipe to school.

Schools, too, are getting on board, hanging banners and sending home brochures backing testmyteen.com, a Web-based company that promotes home drug tests for children.

Although random drug testing in schools – heavily promoted by the White House – has drawn some fire from the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, parental testing of teens has gotten far less attention.

And the practice is quietly exploding.

Internet companies and drug testing labs report huge upswings in teen testing and sales of home drug screening kits.

“(Business) has been awesome,” said Debra Auer, co-owner of Express Drug Screening in Milwaukee

Sales of home testing kits and visits to the lab by teen-toting parents have tripled in the last four years, Auer said.

Drugteststrips.com says its sales have quadrupled in the last five years, and another local testing lab, Noble Diagnostics, says sales of home kits have jumped 30 percent in the last nine months or so.

“From a parent’s perspective, it’s the most empowering thing in the world,” said Kim Hildreth, a Dallas mother who tests her own children and sells home testing kits online at drugtestyourteen.com.

“You’re lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, worried to death all the time,” Hildreth said. “You catch them in little fibs. You don’t know if they’re where they say they are. You worry. There’s no reason for that.”

Hildreth and other proponents call drug testing a powerful deterrent and say it gives teens a socially acceptable reason to reject drug use.

“We taught them to ‘Just Say No,’ but we never told them what to say next,” said Mason Duchatschek, owner of testmyteen.com.

Teens who are tested can tell their friends that their parents test them and that they will lose cell phone, car or other privileges, and their peers understand that, Duchatschek said.

Duchatschek is working with schools across the country to get them to endorse his program of parental testing instead of adopting controversial random testing programs as many other schools have done.

Home drug tests typically cost $6 to $15 for one test that can detect between five and 10 different drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines, opiates and benzodiazepines. Parents dip the test into a cup of urine and results appear within minutes.

Some groups say home drug testing can harm relationships with children.

The Drug Policy Alliance, a national non-profit agency that promotes an overhaul of the nation’s approach to drug problems, says parental testing tears at the bond between children and adults.

“It can have consequences of breaking down communication, of creating rebellion, breaking down relationships of trust,” said Jennifer Kern, a research associate with the office of legal affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance.

Rachael Fugarino, the teen busted for bringing a crack pipe to school, said she was angry when her mom started screening her for drugs but that eventually it was helpful.

“At first I tried to get other people’s pee to try to pass the test,” she said. “Then I realized if I opened up and communicated it helped. It helped to have her know what I was doing.”

The home drug tests now serve as a way for Fugarino to prove she’s clean and earn back her mom’s trust, she said.

For Suzanne Fugarino, the tests offer an end to secretly digging in her daughter’s purse when her daughter is in the shower as she used to do. An end to the accusations and guesswork and, she desperately hopes, an end to all the lies.

“They will tell you anything. ‘I’m sorry. I will never do this again,’ ” she said of teens on drugs. “They know what you want to hear and you want to believe them. But the moment they’re free and out, they’re right back at it.

“At least now she can’t lie to me no longer.”