FEDS FAIL THEIR OWN DRUG TEST

Politics Beats Science, Locks In Obsolete Methods

Don't let the federal government's recent barrage of anti-drug ads
ease your worries about Washington's efforts to fight drug abuse.

Uncle Sam has effectively been coddling drug-using workers in
safety-sensitive jobs. How? He's frozen obsolete technology in place
by insisting on tests taken from a warmed specimen cup.

Federal law requires that workers in specific jobs - including
truckers, airline pilots and air-traffic controllers - undergo drug
tests. The tests almost exclusively come from urine samples.

But those tests are easy to beat. As a result, public safety can
suffer from those who evade drug tests.

New testing methods have emerged. But their widespread use by
government agencies has been stalled by politics, sometimes dressed up
as science. The latest technologies may have been stifled by agency
employees with axes to grind or possible conflicts of interest.

After years of delay, there's hope the federal government will move
forward with better testing standards this fall. Insiders complain
they should have come about much sooner.

''The most generous way to say it is that the federal government only
got into urine testing because of a crisis around the death of
(basketball star) Len Bias and the emergence of crack in 1986,'' said
Dr. Robert DuPont, who was the National Institute on Drug Abuse's
first director under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter.

''The wheels of the bureaucracy turned under the political pressure at
that time. And they have been unable to turn ever again,'' he said.

Since the late 1980s, many think using hair samples rather than urine
is a superior method for detecting a drug habit. Hair tests are widely
used in the private sector. Other technologies relying on saliva and
sweat also show promise.

''Each method of testing - hair, urine - has an optimal application,''
said Raymond Kubacki, president and CEO of leading hair-tester
Psychemedics Corp. ''You want to be able to use the best application
in the best (way),'' he said.

''We've never said (the federal government should) mandate hair
technology, Kubacki added. ''All we've said is include it.''

The private sector started using hair samples to screen for drug use
by employees about a decade ago. General Motors, Blockbuster Video and
Federal Reserve banks are among thousands of workplaces using such
tests.

A number of major police departments also use the method, including
Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis.

Last year, a letter New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir
wrote to Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, reported that ''hair tests detected
drug use at five times the rate of prior urine tests among police
officer candidates, and 30 times the rate of prior urine tests among
probationary police officers.''

Still, the feds have resisted using hair tests, even though Congress
mandates that federal agencies use the best technologies.

What do hair tests offer? For most drug users, beating a urine test
boils down to abstaining for several days. Drugs usually wash out of
human body fluids within that time.

Defeating a hair test would tie most drug users in tangles. Samples
taken from the head can detect drug use that dates back as much as
three months. Tests on other body hair can find information that's
even older.

For example, forensic experts recently studied locks of President
Jackson's hair. They concluded that Jackson, who died in 1845,
probably didn't die from elevated levels of mercury and lead in his
blood, as was widely believed.

Here's how hair testing is done: At the labs, hair lockets are washed,
then stripped of all but their bare essentials before being
transformed to a liquid.

Tests come up positive if an illegal drug or its unique human
metabolite is found in the sample.

Further tests are done to confirm the presence of drugs. The best
tests use state-of-the-art mass spectrometry.

The tests have threshold levels built in to guard against a person who
may have been accidentally exposed to drugs through, say, secondhand
smoke. Other screens root out hair samples that may have been
contaminated.

These thresholds help prevent getting false positive results from,
say, police officers who handle narcotics cases.

DuPont, who's now science advisory board chairman for Psychemedics,
initally had doubts about hair testing.

''I had some patients who had used drugs and asked (Psychemedics) if I
could send them some samples and see how they would do,'' DuPont said.

After sending Psychemedics 10 tests, he said, the company ''got them
all right. I was amazed, because I had accepted the conventional
wisdom of NIDA at the time that this was voodoo.''

DuPont is now skeptical about how fair a shake hair testing will get
when the government finally updates its drug tests.

''I doubt that they're going to say anything positive about hair
testing,'' he said. ''The best they would do, in my view, (is) no
longer be negative.''

Why? Some researchers have questioned whether cocaine, in particular,
binds to darker hair more than lighter strands. If so, that could lead
to more false positives from people with darker hair.

At times, these criticisms of hair testing have taken on an ugly,
racial tinge, fueled by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.

One of the lead backers of the link between hair color and drug
research is Dr. Edward Cone. Until he left NIDA in August 1998, Cone
was one of the federal government's top drug toxicologists. He now
runs his own company in suburban Baltimore.

But Cone's work as a federal employee has come under renewed scrutiny.
In September 1997, Cone served as an expert witness for a New York
City police officer dismissed for testing positive for cocaine use
after a hair test. The officer contested the loss of his unemployment
benefits.

Cone, who was then NIDA's acting chief of clinical pharmacology,
testified that hair testing has shortcomings.

That's usually a no-no. Government employees aren't supposed to act
as expert witnesses for individuals in legal complaints. Instead,
federal personnel rules say they may appear in cases in which only the
federal government has an interest.

The agency the employee works for must grant permission for testimony
in a case like this, in which an individual sued a local government.

Cone refused to respond to questions about his activities, preferring
to limit his answers to scientific questions. Calls made to NIDA's
personnel office at Cone's urging about his status as a federal
employee were not returned.

Since leaving NIDA, Cone has become a consultant to STC Technologies
Inc. of Philadelphia, a marketer of saliva tests.

His influence continues to be felt. Controversy still swirls around a
batch of academic papers published by the federal government as a
monograph in 1997.

The papers were designed to improve the accuracy of surveys about
self-reported drug use by using backup tests, like hair testing. Work
that Cone did that criticized hair testing appeared as an endnote in
each paper. A technical note critical of hair testing was added to the
monograph's introduction.

Objections were raised about the ethics of altering academic papers
without permission.

Lana Harrison, who's now associate director of the Center for Drug and
Alcohol Studies at the University of Delaware, served as the project
editor. ''It had been cleared at NIDA to be published,'' she said.

''When it got down to the Department of Health and Human Services,
they became - my words - nervous,'' Harrison said. ''At that point, I
believe, Psychemedics had just marketed a home hair-test kit to parents.''

Harrison, who stresses she's not a biologist, remains skeptical about
hair testing. Still, she hopes the federal government will make some
use of it in drug tests.

A number of studies have undercut the alleged link between hair color
and positive drug-test results.