PARENTS ADD DRUG TESTS TO SHOPPING LISTS

Sales Rise for Kits That Detect Pot, Ecstasy and Cocaine; Taking a Teen's
Hair Sample

She is never quite sure when it will happen.

Sometimes it's first thing in the morning. Sometimes it is after she
comes home from a friend's house at night. Once it happened when one
of her best friends was over and the two were sitting quietly at the
computer. No matter what she's doing, 15-year-old Taylor Hancock knows
at any moment there is a chance her mother will hand her a plastic
cup, send her to the bathroom to urinate in it, then dip little tabs
into the liquid to check whether the ninth-grader has been using drugs.

Taylor's mother, Jan, buys home drug-testing kits in bulk, either on
the Web or at a local pharmacy in Phoenix, to use on Taylor and her
18-year-old brother, Hunter. Sometimes the kids are clean. Other times
they test positive and Ms. Hancock punishes them. After a test
indicated Taylor had smoked marijuana last summer, her mother barred
her from going on a long-planned trip to Florida with a friend's family.

Worrying and wondering is part of the parental condition: Is she doing
drugs? Will there be booze after the prom? But though past generations
could only fret over such questions, parents of adolescent kids today
have a growing array of tools at their disposal to actually find out
the answers. While the first home drug-testing kits and alcohol
breathalyzers came on the market about five years ago, these products
- -- which started with law enforcement, then moved into the workplace
- -- are increasingly seeping into family life. Nationwide sales of home
drug-testing kits have nearly doubled since 2003, to over $20 million
in the year ended in March, according to Information Resources Inc., a
market-research firm. Q3 Innovations, which makes home breathalyzers
(ranging from $59.99 to $139.99), has seen sales double every year
since it introduced its first model five years ago.

All major drugstore chains and places like Wal-Mart now offer urine
test kits that can detect marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and a variety of
other drugs. Phamatech is now pushing to get its QuickScreen At Home
kits, which retail for between $14.95 and $29.95, on the shelves of a
number of food-store chains as well. Store shelves offer a growing array of
at-home drug tests.

And some companies are now offering more user-friendly types of tests.
Psychemedics Corp. now offers home test kits using hair samples --
which can be less awkward than asking for urine specimens and are less
susceptible to tampering -- though the samples must be sent to a lab
for analysis.

While those tests are overt, there is an increasing variety of stealth
means to keep tabs on teens, too, from peeking at their emails to
reading their blogs. You can check their cellphone to find out the
numbers they've been calling -- and who's been calling them. You can
buy devices for your car that tell precisely where it's being driven,
and how fast.

"The technology for monitoring family members is robust and it's
getting stronger all the time," says Robert McCrie, professor of
security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New
York.

The result is a growing dilemma of modern parenthood: Should you
actually do it?

Matter of Trust

The majority of parents, of course, haven't gone to such extremes as
testing for drugs. For some parents who once experimented with drugs
themselves, the prospect of betraying a child's trust is more
upsetting than drug use. But, for others, testing is a smart, prudent
measure. After all, even drugs considered relatively mild, like
marijuana, are considerably more potent today than in years past.

For many, the decision to test or not really comes down to a weighing
of trust vs. safety. Steve Sherrets of Independence, Iowa, and his
wife were terrified of the prospect of their teenage kids drinking and
driving. "We knew people who'd gotten killed," Mr. Sherrets says. One
day they sat their two boys down and said they were thinking about
buying a home breathalyzer. "I said, 'This isn't to catch you --
hopefully it will be a deterrent," Mr. Sherrets says.

They use their Alcohawk breathalyzer randomly -- sometimes three
nights in a row, sometimes not for three weeks. Only once has one of
their boys tested positive -- after a pep rally and bonfire.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The Hancock family's experience shows both the strengths and the
shortcomings of testing. Ms. Hancock, a divorced 44-year-old who works
in marketing at a Fortune 500 company, began testing her son after he
was caught smoking marijuana. Though she had no reason to believe her
daughter was involved with drugs, she decided to start testing her,
too, with the support, she says, of her ex-husband. "I told her it was
to keep her from making bad choices, from succumbing to peer
pressure," Ms. Hancock says.

Taylor complies. "At first I was mad," she says. But then she says she
became secretly happy because it gave her an excuse to say "no" to her
friends.

Still, she hasn't consistently stayed away from drugs. About a year
ago, she says she started to get curious about marijuana and other
drugs. She tried pot with her friends and then "some pills," she says
- -- knowing she would be caught. Now, she says if her mother didn't
test her all the time, she'd probably do drugs more often. Her mother
believes that, too.

People in the addiction and drug prevention field have mixed feelings
about testing. They note that there can be problems with accuracy.
Though parents like the surprise element of springing a test on kids
at varying times of day, that practice may not yield the most accurate
results. Ken Adams, president of Home Health Testing, a unit of
Melbourne, Fla.-based AB Diagnostics Inc., says it's best to test as
soon as they wake up, since the first urine of the morning is the
strongest. Hair samples are tricky, too, he says. You need to get 50
strands, 1.5 inches in length, cut one-quarter-inch from the scalp.

The most reliable home drug-testing kits have been approved by the FDA
and offer confirmation of the results by a medical laboratory. The
industry's best seller, Phamatech's $29.99 At Home multipanel, which
tests for five types of drugs, includes a special mailer for people to
send the results to the company's lab in San Diego.

Having the Doctor Do It

Given all the potential pitfalls in home testing, Harris B. Stratyner,
clinical director of addiction at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New
York, recommends asking a pediatrician to perform a drug test instead
of taking on the delicate matter yourself. Dr. Stratyner fears that
many parents aren't equipped to deal with a positive result. A
pediatrician, however, can work with the family and refer them to a
specialist. Testing at home is "a tricky business," he warns. "It can
affect the relationship between the child and parent."