TESTING THE DRUG TEST LABS

All three labs detected the drug in the African-American user, two failed
to find it in the white user.

CBS NEW YORK Wednesday, February 17,1999 - 10:13 AM ET

(CBS) This week, a series of special reports by CBS This Morning
Correspondent Roberta Baskin raised important questions about the
reliability of using hair tests to detect drug use. Her three-month
investigation concludes with her own exclusive survey, and results that
should be of real concern for anyone who's subjected to hair testing.

More than 1,500 employers now make hiring and firing decisions based on
drug tests that use hair samples. But the concerns of scientists prompted
some hair testing of our own.

Why a hair test? Because when a person uses drugs, it goes straight into
the bloodstream, then into the hair shaft where traces of drug use can
remain for months. But how reliably and accurately can those traces be
measured in the laboratory?

"Very accurately," says Ray Kubacki, president and CEO of Psychemedics, the
largest hair testing company in the U.S. "It does a great job of picking up
all the drugs," he says.

But Dr. Michael Walsh, the former drug adviser to Presidents Reagan and
Bush, is one of a number of scientists who question the results coming out
of hair testing labs.

"There are so many questions yet unresolved about hair testing that it is
totally unreasonable to use the results of a hair test to make a decision
about whether to hire or fire someone," Dr. Walsh says.

So what would he say to the firms using hair testing for drugs? "As P.T.
Barnum said, 'there's a sucker born every minute,' and I think a lot of
these corporations have been suckered by some good salesmanship and good
marketing," he says.

We decided to check for ourselves. First, we set up a fictitious company,
appropriately named The Strand Group, and found three labs to conduct our
hair tests.

We used Associated Pathologists Laboratories in Las Vegas; United States
Drug Testing Laboratories outside Chicago; and home testing kits made by
Psychemedics.

We sent identical batches of eight hair samples to each of the three labs.
Some contained high levels of cocaine and PCP. Some contained codeine, an
opiate. Two samples contained no drugs at all. Each hair sample was
prepared by leading scientific experts, their work confirmed with state of
the art equipment. We included a sample from a frequent marijuana and
cocaine user who asked that we not reveal his identity. We confirmed his
use with an old-fashioned urine test.

Most of our results came back within 72 hours, and they showed just how
flawed hair testing can be.

All three labs did a good job detecting the high levels of cocaine in our
samples, and correctly identified the cocaine use by our anonymous drug user.

But none of the three found the marijuana.

All three hair testing labs missed the opiates, and two out of the three
labs missed the PCP, even though the levels were about four times higher
than those the labs claim they can detect.

We also tested scientists' concerns that hair testing might be
color-biased. Recent tests on laboratory animals have shown that the
concentration of drugs in black hair can be up to 50 times higher than in
lighter-colored hair.

Sure enough, when we sent hair samples from two people who took the same
low amounts of cocaine, all three labs detected the drug in the
African-American user, while two failed to find it in the white user. One
lab rejected the hair sample as too small to test.

Raymond Kelly, head of Associated Pathologists Laboratories, says, "It's
really hard to get anything statistically significant out of one sample of
each type - that's just a far too tiny population. That's one of the
problems I have with these studies that show that there is a hair color
bias issue."

Finally, we saw how someone can falsely be accused of being a user simply
by being around drugs. The hair of an 8-year old child was exposed to low
concentrations of cocaine, then washed several times. Psychemedics
correctly reported the contamination. But the other two labs reported the
child's hair positive for cocaine. They even reported finding a chemical in
it which can only be produced through ingestion.

Dr. Christine Moore is director of United States Drug Testing Laboratories,
one of the two labs that found the 8-year old tested positive for cocaine.
She says, "It's difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference
between use and contamination."

Dr. Moore adds, "We need to have more blind samples sent and these types of
things where people know what's in the samples to test the laboratory. That
can only help with us to improve our own work."

She says she wants to re-examine her lab procedures to understand why it
missed the opiates.

To the credit of all three labs, the drug-free samples we sent all came
back drug-free.

As Dr Michael Walsh puts it, "There are no outside proficiency testing or
quality control or certification programs that are providing an oversight
over this technology. So the buyer has to beware."

Ours was a small sample, not a scientific study. But it raises serious
credibility questions about hair testing.

Consider this: if drug testing labs were wrong just one percent of the
time, it would add up to 250,000 wrong results. By Roberta Baskin