HOME DRUG TESTING SHUFFLES PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

On a weekday afternoon in 1992, Sunny Cloud, an insurance salesman and
single mother in Marietta, Ga., dropped by her home unexpectedly and found
her 16-year-old son, Ron, smoking marijuana.

Stunned, Cloud hustled the boy off to the nearest hospital emergency room,
where she asked doctors to screen his urine. "I was scared," she said
recently, "and I didn't know what else to do."

The procedure was expensive and embarrassing. So Cloud, still suspicious of
her son, decided to do her own drug tests, sending him into the family
bathroom in boxer shorts with instructions to come out with a cup full of
urine that she could ship to a local laboratory for analysis.

That is how Cloud began a cottage industry: the home drug-testing business.
As more teenagers experiment with illicit drugs, a small but growing roster
of companies, including Parents Alert, founded by Cloud in 1994, are
marketing drug-testing kits to parents.

In October, the Food and Drug Administration approved the latest of these
kits, the

QuickScreen at Home Drug Test made by Phamatech, a San Diego manufacturer of
diagnostic tests. The company bills its product as the first to give parents
a result at home.

Phamatech says the kit, which hit drugstores this month, makes screening for
marijuana, cocaine, LSD or heroin as simple as taking a home-pregnancy test.

But while advocates of the kits describe them as lifelines for parents
struggling to keep their teenagers away from illicit drugs, critics warn the
tests will turn parents into detectives, undermining the fragile trust
essential in guiding children through the tumultuous teenage years.

"If parents want the illusion of control, then I think they should scamper
out and buy this kit and use it," said Dr. Daniel Gottlieb, a family
therapist in suburban Philadelphia and an adviser to the Federal Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "On the other hand, if they
want a good relationship with their child, they need to talk to their child
to find out what is going on in that child's life."

Teenage use of illicit drugs has risen steadily over the past six years,
according to Monitoring the Future, a University of Michigan study that has
examined drug abuse among high school seniors annually since 1975.

Among the graduating class of 1992, 27.1 percent had used an illegal drug in
the year before the survey; by last year, the figure had jumped to 42.4
percent. In 1997, Nearly half of 12th graders had tried marijuana by the
time they graduated; 8.7 percent had tried cocaine; 13.6 percent had tried
LSD and 2.1 percent had tried heroin.

But those figures do not mean that drug dependency is rampant among
teenagers. Dr. David Feinberg, a child psychiatrist and expert in addiction
at the University of California at Los Angeles, estimates that 5 percent of
American teenagers are addicted to drugs.

Parents, he said, need to be able to tell dependency from the "normal
experimentation," that is part of the rite of passage to adulthood, a
distinction a drug test cannot make.

"Parents should not be performing medical tests on their kids," Feinberg
said. Nor, he added, should pediatricians. "The way to determine if a kid
has a drug problem is the way to determine if a kid has any problem, first
by taking a history, then a physical."

Moreover, Feinberg says, the tests do not always tell the truth. Eating a
poppy seed bagel can render a urine test positive; so, too, can taking
certain over-the-counter cold remedies.

The new test marketed by Phamatech cautions parents that while a negative
result is proof that a child is not using drugs, a positive result is not
conclusive and must be confirmed by a laboratory.

"Some people have said, `Don't you think this is like Big Brother watching
you?"' asked Carl Mongiovi, Phamatech's director of operations and
regulatory affairs. "Neither myself nor my company is interested in getting
into the family unit, telling people how to do things. But parents seem to
need some help."

Mongiovi and other test proponents, including officials at the National
Parents' Resource In Drug Education, a nonprofit group based in Atlanta, say
talking with young people about drugs is hardly as easy as Feinberg
suggests. They argue that when parents have suspicions that a child is
using drugs, testing might be a good way - in some cases, the only way - to
start a truthful dialog.

"Many parents that I have talked to feel that it is hard for them to discuss
this with their adolescents," said Dr. Herbert Kleber, medical director of
the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
"These tests can help deal with that issue, if they are used as part of the
communication between parent and child. If they are used as a club, they are
going to cause harm."

The kits come in various forms. Cloud's version, the Parents Alert Home Drug
Test Service, sells for $44.95 and includes a urine collection bottle, a
prepaid courier package to send to the lab and the toll-free number of a
drug counselor.

She says the counseling is essential. "A drug test is just a tool," she
said. "It gives you information. What most people don't know is what to do
with the information."

Phamatech's test is designed to eliminate the laboratory, as much as
possible. The company says its kit, which costs between $25 and $35, will
tell parents in about 10 minutes if their children are free of drugs. It
already is used by employers.

For those who do not like the idea of urine tests, there is an at- home hair
analysis kit, marketed by the Psychemedics Corp. for $59.95.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst