Common Drug Testing Methods
Drug addiction poses a serious threat to health and well being of an individual and to entire society. Drug abuse can destroy lives of youngsters, ruins families, and leads to loss of productivity and efficiency at workplaces. Depression, anxiety, seizures, violent behavior, and social problems are some of the fall outs of drug addiction. There are various drug testing methods to check drug abuse. Drug testing methods test for presence of drugs in urine, saliva, sweat, blood, and hair.
Urine Drug Testing
Urine drug testing is an easy, reliable, and convenient way to check for presence of drugs and metabolites. A number of drugs in any combination can be detected through urine drug testing in accurate way. Urine drug testing can be easily performed in homes, offices, schools, and colleges. The urine drug testing can detect the drugs taken in the past 2-7 days. Various onsite urine drug testing kits can test for presence of number of drugs at single time and give quick results. There is always a risk of adulteration of sample in urine drug testing. Hence, sample collection for urine drug testing should be done under supervision to maintain integrity.
Saliva Drug Testing
Saliva drug testing provides a reasonably accurate way to detect presence of drugs in the last few hours. This testing method is non-invasive and provides results for presence of number of drugs at single time. Saliva drug testing can be easily performed at homes, workplaces, schools, colleges, and other locations. There are very less chances of adulteration of samples as they are taken in front of everyone. Various onsite saliva drug testing kits are easy to handle and provide quick results. However, saliva drug testing has a short window of detection and detects drug abuse within past 48 hours.
Spray (Sweat) Drug Testing
Spray (Sweat) drug testing is used to detect drug abuse over a period of couple of weeks or more. It is used when other methods like urine testing can not detect drug abuse for such longer period. It is an effective drug-monitoring method as a sweat patch affixed on the person’s skin collects sweat over past couple of weeks. If the person uses drugs in this period, then the sweat which contains the drugs is absorbed by these patches. The sweat drug testing is also non-invasive and easy to perform. It provides for a longer window of drug detection. It is also tamper proof as it is difficult to paste it again once removed. However, sweat drug testing is prone to contamination, and even difference in rates of sweat production in persons can give erroneous test results.
Hair Drug Testing
Hair drug testing method can provide drug abuse history for upto 90 days. In this testing, a small sample of hair is analyzed for presence of drug molecules and metabolites which gets deposited in hair. The drug molecules get deposited in hair as blood containing these molecules constantly nourishes the hair. If the person is completely bald, then hair strands can also be collected from other parts of body. There are very less chances of adulterating the hair sample. Hair drug testing is accurate and expensive than other forms of testing as it is performed in laboratories using advanced analytical techniques.
Various drug testing methods provide only preliminary analytical results. More advanced methods like Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS) needs to be conducted for confirmation purposes. If person is found to be drug addicted, then immediate steps should be taken to refrain the person from using drugs to avoid further harmful complications.
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