HAIR TESTING FOR DRUG USE ON STUDENTS IS DEBATED

NEW ORLEANS -- Hair testing to detect illicit drug use, a procedure already
popular with at least 1,000 employers in the United States, is now being
adopted by some schools, opening a new chapter in the continuing debate over
the best way to keep adolescents from experimenting with drugs.

De la Salle High School here, which is affiliated with the Brothers of the
Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic order, began testing the hair of its 870
students in March 1998 in a pilot program sponsored by Psychemedics Corp.,
the leading hair-testing company. Five other Catholic schools in the New
Orleans region have followed suit.

"Our motivation is to provide a good place for kids to learn and develop,"
said Yvonne Gelpi, De la Salle's president, "and if you keep that in focus,
it enables you to do the right thing."

Parents seem relieved that the school has assumed some of the burden of
trying to keep their children off drugs. And hair testing deters drug use,
some teachers say, by giving teen-agers an excuse to resist peer pressure.

"It's very simple," said Joseph Hines, De la Salle's dean of students. "'My
school drug-tests me; I can't do it (drugs).'"

The federal government, which has set strict standards for urine testing,
has not done so for hair tests because it is not convinced of their
accuracy. And the American Civil Liberties Union opposes random testing,
regardless of whether someone is suspected of drug use.

"We're always concerned about testing people who haven't done anything
wrong," said Lewis Maltby, director of the employment rights office of the
ACLU. Hair testing, Maltby said, "is growing fast and that's what alarms us.
The problem is easy to state: It doesn't work. It's not reliable."

Private schools can make drug tests a condition of enrollment without
inviting lawsuits. But now two public high school principals in New Orleans
want to test their students, too, raising the prospect of a legal battle
with national ramifications.

"It is an invasion of privacy," said Joe Cook, executive director of the
ACLU of Louisiana. "What somebody's done over the last 90 days without
harming anyone is nobody's business."

Harry Connick, the district attorney of Orleans Parish, which includes New
Orleans, argues that hair testing at school is constitutional because it
meets the criteria for protecting health and safety concerns stemming from
drug use.

"What's wrong with taking a piece of hair from your head?" Connick asked.

As he pointed out, courts have upheld drug tests of school athletes in
Oregon and of students engaged in extracurricular activities in Indiana and
Arkansas.

Raymond Kubacki Jr., president of Psychemedics, which is based in Cambridge,
Mass., said 80 schools, mostly private, in 26 states are using Psychemedics
to test their students for drugs.

Hair testing is based on the premise that ingested drugs travel through the
bloodstream and are deposited in hair follicles roughly in proportion to the
amount taken. Traces remain in the hair, disclosing how long the drugs have
been used.

"Think of it as rings of a tree," Kubacki said.

Since hair grows at the rate of a half-inch a month, the test uses the
inch-and-a-half closest to the scalp to detect drug use for the last 90
days. A hair sample the diameter of a shoelace tip is clipped and sent to a
laboratory, which liquefies the follicles to measure the presence of five
drugs: marijuana, heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and phencyclidine, or PCP.

Government researchers have raised questions about whether drug molecules
bind more to coarser black hair than to finer blond or brownish hair,
creating racial or gender disparities, and whether passive exposure to
marijuana or other smoked drugs could produce a false positive.

"It's not a matter of detecting it in hair but in interpreting what you
find," said Michael Welch, a research chemist for the National Institute of
Standards and Technology. "Experienced labs generally do a pretty good job
of identifying what's in hair."

But Welch added, "It's potentially possible that people could have
detectable levels in their hair without ever using the drug. I think it's
going to take more research before these problems are resolved."

Kubacki said Psychemedics uses a patented method that distinguishes between
external contamination and ingestion by thoroughly washing the hair sample
beforehand and identifying not just the drug but also its metabolite, a
substance produced by the body's metabolism. Before the test, the process
also extracts the melanin, which gives hair its color, he said.

Tom Mieczkowski, a professor of criminology at the University of South
Florida who specializes in the technology of drug testing, said hair testing
is as accurate as urinalysis. Because body fluids like urine are excreted
swiftly, Mieczkowski said, "hair testing is almost the only thing we have"
to gauge longer-term drug use.

Hair testing is used by courts, police forces and other law-enforcement
agencies. Connick, the district attorney, said his office had been using the
tests "with excellent results" to evaluate drug offenders for diversion into
treatment programs.

"It's a great method of detecting a history of drug use," he said. "The
larger time frame allows you to find out what the defendant has been using."