DRUG TESTING GETS NEW FOCUS: HAIR, SALIVA

PHILADELPHIA - Put 30 drug testing workers in a room together for a
few hours and it isn't long before they start trading strange -- and
somewhat indelicate -- tales of urine collection.

Stories of specimens doctored to the most vivid hues of blue, green
and purple, and others spiked with bleach or diluted with chewing
tobacco. Talk of false penises, and synthetic urine formulated in
separate his and hers versions. And accounts of mystery concoctions
ingested or added to try to ensure that urine does not betray the drug
use of its provider.

``It's just amazing,'' says Sherri Vogler, who runs Houston Medical
Testing Service, a specimen collection company. ``Beating a drug test
has become a major industry.''

Drug screening is a rite of passage for millions of U.S. workers, with
more than 40 million tests conducted each year by employers and
others. The vast majority are done by collecting a urine sample, which
people in the testing business refer to, mostly straight-faced, as
their ``gold standard.''

Most aren't using

The ``positive'' rates are low -- less than 5 percent -- suggesting
that most people aren't using drugs, let alone trying to cheat.

But the prevalence of screening and the reach of the Internet has
fostered a thriving cottage industry of entrepreneurs who promise to
help workers beat the tests.

The federal government hopes to crack down on cheating by broadening
testing of its own employees over the next year to include saliva,
hair and sweat. Some private employers already have adopted the
alternative testing methods, and new government standards could lead
even more companies to make the switch.

``You want to create a new mechanism for cheating on drug tests, we're
going to create a mechanism to catch it,'' said Robert Stephenson II,
an official with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, which sets standards for testing federal workers.

But tests using so-called alternative matrices already are fueling a
new round of cat-and-mouse, as companies who specialize in beating
tests scramble to market products they claim will foil hair and saliva
screening.

``The government can go ahead and try to catch up and they will
eventually, but they're going to have to do that through legislation.
They're not going to do it through science,'' said Tony Wilson, a
spokesman for Spectrum Labs, a Cincinnati company that markets an
ever-changing lineup of products designed to beat drug tests.

Spectrum got its start in 1992 with a product called Urine Luck, a
urine additive whose formula the company keeps changing in a bid to
stay one step ahead of the testing labs bent on deciphering and
detecting it.

``I think there's version 7.3 out there right now. It's like
software,'' Ted Shults, chairman of the American Association of
Medical Review Officers, says with grudging admiration.

But as new types of tests have gained acceptance in the past few
years, Spectrum also has begun looking beyond urine. The company now
sells nine different products, including Get Clean Shampoo intended to
counteract hair tests and Quick Fizz tablets for saliva tests.

``It's not about defrauding anybody,'' Wilson said of his company's
products. ``It's about protecting privacy, because people have no
privacy anymore.''

The constant transformations by Spectrum and companies like it have
complicated the work of test labs and employers, said Shults, whose
group is made up of doctors charged with reviewing the methods and
procedures used in drug screening.

A handful of states have begun cracking down, passing laws that forbid
the sale of substances or devices designed to beat drug tests. So far
there has been only limited enforcement.

In one closely watched case, South Carolina prosecutors won conviction
of a businessman, Kenneth Curtis, for violating a state law that bans
the sale of urine to cheat on a drug test. Curtis, who began serving a
six-month sentence in February, sold thousands of containers of his
own urine in the late 1990s over the Internet.

Catching fakers

Labs and firms that make the testing technology say they've worked
aggressively to screen out cheaters who use substitute urine or
adulterants.

Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest providers of workplace drug
tests, reports that the most common type of adulterants were detected
in just 0.02 percent of the 2.8 million tests it administered in the
first half of last year. That is down from 0.23 percent in 1999, an
all-time high.

Substituted urine was detected in 0.03 percent of tests, a figure that
has stayed roughly constant over time.

Alternative testing will make it even harder for cheaters, said Barry
Sample, director of science and technology for Quest's corporate
health and wellness division. Unlike most urine tests, hair and saliva
tests are done under direct observation, making substitution very
difficult, he said. So far, products marketed to foil the test don't
appear to work, he said.

But Sample said he doesn't expect cheaters and companies that cater to
them to give up.

``I think as the alternative matrices grow in their application in the
industry and in the workforce, you will see more varied types of
products that are available to attempt to help a donor cheat on their
test,'' he said.