RANDOM DRUG TESTING COMES HOME

On a weekday afternoon in 1992, Sunny Cloud, an insurance saleswoman and
single mother in Marietta, Ga., dropped by her home unexpectedly and found
her 16-year-old son, Ron, smoking marijuana. Stunned, Ms. 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 Ms. 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 Ms. Cloud began a cottage industry: the home drug testing
business. As more teen-agers experiment with illicit drugs, a small but
growing roster of companies, including Parents Alert, founded by Ms. Cloud
in 1994, are marketing drug testing kits to parents.

Last month, 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 that when the kit hits drug stores in December, screening
for marijuana, cocaine, LSD or heroin will be as simple as taking a home
pregnancy test.

But while advocates of the kits describe them as lifelines for parents
struggling to keep their teen-agers away from illicit drugs, critics warn
that the tests will turn parents into detectives, undermining the fragile
trust essential in guiding children through the tumultuous teen-age 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 H. 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."

Teen-age use of illicit drugs has risen steadily over the past six years,
according to Monitoring the Future, a study by the University of Michigan
that has examined drug abuse among high school seniors every year 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, while alarming, do not mean that drug dependency is
rampant among teen-agers. Dr. David T. Feinberg, a child psychiatrist and
expert in addiction at the University of California at Los Angeles,
estimates that 5 percent of American teen-agers 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," Feinberg said.

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 proponents of the tests, 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 and others suggest. They argue that when parents have suspicions
that a child is using drugs, testing may be a good way -- in some cases,
the only way -- to start a truthful dialogue.

"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. Ms. 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 will cost between $25 and $35,
will tell parents in about 10 minutes if their children are free of drugs.
It is already 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., a biotechnology company
in Cambridge, Mass. Psychemedics bills the product as "designed for parents
concerned about drug abuse." The hair test costs $59.95, and has the
advantage of surprise: A parent can take a snip of hair while a child is
sleeping.

It is difficult to determine how many of these kits are sold each year;
most of the companies involved will not divulge sales figures. But Ken
Adams, the owner of Parents Home Drug Testing, a company that is doing a
brisk business selling unlicensed tests over the Internet, says he sells
1,000 kits a month.

Dr. Bruce Burlington, director of the Center for Devices and Radiological
Health at the FDA, said several companies have requested approval for tests
similar to Phamatech's.

Although Adams says his company operates in a "gray area," Bruce Burlington
of the FDA says the food and drug agency considers the sale of unlicensed
tests illegal. "We are in the process right now of weighing what actions we
should take," he said.

The companies marketing these tests advocate that parents set up a "family
drug policy." "Start when they are 11 or 12," Adams suggested. "Say that
part of the family drug policy is that there is going to be random drug
testing. That doesn't mean I don't love you and I don't trust you. It means
that this thing is too serious to take a chance."

Adams and Ms. Cloud both argue that the at-home tests can give adolescents
an easy out -- "a good excuse to say no to peer pressure," in Ms. Cloud's
words. Her son, Ron, now a 22-year-old junior at the University of Georgia,
agrees. He said he smoked his first marijuana cigarette in the eighth
grade, and by 10th grade he was smoking marijuana and taking LSD regularly.

"His grades slipped," Ms. Cloud said. "He started getting belligerent."
Cloud said that he stopped using drugs several years ago, after some "major
spiritual revelations" that began four years ago, when he was a senior in
high school. He said he had attended a concert by the heavy metal group
Nine Inch Nails, had taken LSD and "was pretty far out there."

"I felt like I was going into the depths of hell," he said. After the
concert, he went home and woke up his mother. "I told her I was sorry for
the torture I was putting her through." Subsequently, he said, he turned to
religion.

Although he initially resented the drug tests his mother forced him to
take, Cloud said that they did "play a role in putting me down a good path."

"I knew that I couldn't go out and get crazy."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski