subject: Drug Testing By Hair Sample [print this page] Drug testing has become a more popular process used by companies in recent years, including pre-employment requirement for new employees, random, for cause and post- accident testing. Common methods used for workplace drug testing include urine and saliva samples.
Aside from these known drug-testing methods, one of the other options to examine drug use is through a hair sample from the person in question. Drug testing using a hair sample is best used for profiles of over a week up to three months or more, such as for child protection and pre-employment and specialist workplace testing.
It is easy to collect, with less hygiene issues than other biological samples.
Simple to dispatch
Although a one-off hair drug test is more expensive compared to sweat, saliva, or urine drug testing, its long-term profile means that the results provide a window of detection that could only be matched by many more saliva or urine tests conducted over a period of time. For this reason, when a long term profile is required such as for a pre-employment test hair analysis can be very useful.
Other benefits are the fact that hair follicle drug testing is less intrusive, can actually show whether the person has recently ceased drug use in an attempt to cover up a drug problem, and has the capacity to detect drugs much further back than other samples.
Drug testing of this kind only requires taking a small snippet of hair and an on-site hair collection can be performed. No need to go to laboratories or restrooms to collect a sample from the person being examined.
The hair is usually washed first before drug testing is done in order to avoid picking up drug chemicals that may have come from external sources rather than the actual ingested substances.
So if you really want to have a drug free workplace, hair drug testing is one option to consider and can compliment the use of other sample types in a workplace drug and alcohol test programme.. It is fast, reliable, and secure.
