GOLD STANDARD: DRUG-TESTING EXPERTS WORK TO STAY A STEP AHEAD

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," said Sherri Vogler, who runs a Houston
specimen-collection company and led the discussion recently at a training
session for testing workers held at a Philadelphia hotel. "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."

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 have 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 employees over the next year to include scrutiny of workers'
saliva, hair and sweat. Some private employers have already 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 are already fueling a new
round of cat-and-mouse, as companies who specialize in test-beating
scramble to market products they say 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, the chairman of the American Association of Medical Review
Officers, said with grudging admiration.

But as new types of tests have gained acceptance in the past few years,
Spectrum has also begun looking beyond urine. The company now sells 9
products, including Get Clean Shampoo intended to counteract hair tests and
Quick Fizz tablets for saliva tests.

The constant morphing by Spectrum and companies like it has 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
only been 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.

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

Quest Diagnostics Inc., 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, the 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.

The specimen collectors who administer drug tests said that experience has
shown some screening subjects will go to extraordinary measures to evade a
test.

Robert Brewster, the owner of a testing company in Altamonte Springs, Fla.
, recalls when he went to a construction site to administer an unannounced
drug test and one of the workers tried to run him over with a truck.

Darrell Fontenot, an independent tester from Crowley, La. who regularly
conducts tests on offshore oil rigs, said that entire work crews have quit
on the spot - even when that spot was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico -
rather than submit to his test.

Other workers have used decidedly more clandestine methods, said collectors
at the one-day seminar in Philadelphia run by the Drug and Alcohol Testing
Industry Association.

Vogler, whose Houston Medical Testing Service has been doing drug screens
since 1989, said that staffers have caught people with bottles of
substitute urine taped to their legs.

Urine is tested for temperature when it is collected, leading some subjects
to heat synthetic or substitute urine. The most skilled do so with special
heating units hidden in their clothing. The less adept have been known to
turn in specimen cups charred at the bottom from exposure to a cigarette
lighter, she said.

People also deliberately try to contaminate samples, using everything from
soap to antacid tablets and a variety of chemical additives.

"If it glows in the dark, it's not normal," Vogler said, as her fellow
specimen collectors chuckled and nodded their heads knowingly.

Fontenot said he once overheard workers discussing how they swallowed
teaspoons of bleach in hopes it would taint their test. A friend told him
about a worker who had his five-year-old son urinate in a cup every few
weeks to provide him with a ready substitute sample that he kept handy for
random drug tests.

Then there are men who rely on such products as the Whizzinator, a fillable
prosthetic penis that is marketed in five skin tones to evade the notice of
test monitors. Testers said they've almost certainly missed a few of those.

In a business reliant on tests designed to be standardized and repetitive,
it keeps things very interesting, Vogler said.

"I've been in it for 14 years and (sometimes) I'll think I've seen it all,"
she said. "But then something new will happen, and it'll be like, 'No, I
haven't seen it all yet.'"