There are various kinds of tests that you can do these days to ascertain whether someone has been on drugs or not. While some drug tests use a saliva sample, or a blood sample to test for drug addiction, there are others that use a urine sample for drug abuse testing.

While gathering a sample for drug testing may seem invasive or perhaps tedious, a drug test is a necessary thing to do when you are recruiting people for a specific industry or trying to check if someone has been on drugs before coming to work. It’s also an important tool when you’re helping someone who struggles with drug addiction.

A urine or saliva-based home drug test may also work for a one time check for teens involved in drug addiction, but the one we would most recommend for these purposes is the hair drug test.

A hair drug test (also known as the hair follicle drug test) is something that can help you fight drug addiction by ensuring that you understand the history of the last 90 days with one snip of a hair. In fact, the great thing about a hair drug test is that you can check for more than 6 drugs at the same time. These include marijuana, cocaine, opiates, methamphetamines, ecstasy, PCP and amphetamines.

The blood in the body is known to nourish hair as it grows. If there are drugs in the blood, they will inevitably get into the hair follicles and move outwards as the hair grows. The hair drug test is not a great test to check on whether someone has consumed drugs in the last couple of days. This is mainly because the drug takes some time in getting into the hair and therefore it requires about a week for the results to show.

For accurate results, the hair sample required for the hair drug test should include at least 100 to 150 strands of hair. A sample of hair that is half inch long can give you a hair drug test analysis for about 30 days of drug history. Similarly an inch and a half of hair can tell you the history of drug abuse for 90 days.

The fact that it can tell you a history of drug abuse makes it a great tool for those who have already undergone rehab and are looking at avoiding a relapse. The collection of the hair sample is one of the easiest samples to take. In addition to that, the number of days that can be tested for is also a critical factor that makes it most suited for testing for rehab patients.

A home hair drug test can also be used if you want to make sure that your teens are not lying about whether they had a drug for the first time or not when they are caught. You only need to collect a snip of hair sample (you can choose to cut from different places on the scalp) and place it in a collection foil to send to the laboratory. Then the lab can tell you not only if your teen was using drugs in the past 3 months, but how frequently – if the teen is a daily user, or if the teen uses drugs recreationally. You’ll be able to use this information to create the most helpful and constructive response possible when dealing with your teen’s drug use.

Check out our Hair Drug Test section for more information.  Please note that the PDT-90 test and the Express Hair Follicle 7 Drug, Standard Hair Follicle 7 Drug, and Hair Drug Test for Business do have a few minor differences:  the number of drugs tested for (6 or 7) and whether detailed frequency of use information is available with your results (in the case of the PDT-90, no; in the case of the other 3 tests, yes).

– Anne Hamilton