5 Quick Facts about the Hair Follicle Drug Test

Think fast! What do you want to know about hair drug testing?

1. It goes back 90 days. The standard detection period for hair drug testing is set by the lab. This goes for businesses sending in employees to be tested, and consumers sending in samples from their home hair drug test kits. Both labs used by Home Health Testing go back 90 days.

The subject to be tested

The subject to be tested

2. Yes, it works. Studies have shown that compared to urine drug testing, hair drug testing finds between 4 to 8 times the amount of users, in part because the detection period is so much longer.

3. It won’t make you bald.. While 100-120 strands of hair are required, that really only amounts to the diameter of a pencil.

4. But you can’t just supply one hair. A hair drug testing lab needs a sufficient sample in order to wash, liquidate, and analyze the hair effectively.

5. You can’t cheat them. Shampoos aren’t going to help you – the inside of the hair is analyzed, not the outside. This means external contamination is near impossible too.

See anything on this list something you want to know but do not (yet)? Just send us an email (cs at homehealthtesting.com). We will be glad to answer your questions! And you can check out our hair follicle drug test page here.

Fight Relapse – Use A Hair Drug Test

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

Are You Ready for the Olympics?

It’s hard not to enjoy the Olympics.  There’s always some aspect to get your attention – the variety of people attending, sports you never heard of, flags you’ve never seen, new things to learn.  We have learned something new already today – do you know Ross Rebagliati?

Ross won the first gold medal ever for snowboarding at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan.  After this great accomplishment, the International Olympic Committee rewarded him by stepping in – and taking his medal.  Why?

Because he failed a drug test.

Ross tested positive for marijuana and the medal was taken from him, although not for long.  Interestingly enough, at the time the International Olympic Committee did not have a set policy with regard to marijuana as a banned substance, at least where it concerned snowboarders and skiers and others monitored by the International Ski Foundation.  The medal was given back when it was determined that the International Olympic Committee, for the reason given above, had no right to take the medal.  You can read more details about this at the National Drug Strategy Network’s site.

Imagine losing a gold medal to a drug test!  It’s happened to a lot of people – CBC, the big Canadian news outlet, has an interesting rundown of all the different ways people have cheated in the Olympics.

It’s now all the harder for athletes to pass a drug test with the invention of the hair drug test.  When you can collect a drug history of 90 days on someone, it is hard to keep a secret, and the hair follicle test is also very difficult to cheat.  The hair follicle drug test tests the drugs inside the hair, breaking down the hair once it reaches the lab in order to get to what’s inside that’s hard to reach with shampoos or any other method.

It’s hard to beat your competitors in the Olympics, but it’s also hard to beat a drug test.  Stay clean and remember what an important tool a hair drug test can be for finding out drug use amongst you, your family, and friends.

Hair Drug Testing – Police Are Subject To It Too

You may be used to the idea of police conducting drug testing, and alcohol testing as well.  But did you ever think about the fact that police are drug tested too?  As in many other professions, especially those that are safety related (and police work certainly is that), police departments can test their workers.

This news article (ABC News: Police To Be Drug Tested Under New Laws) from ABC News, an Australian outlet, details the initiative to bring drug testing into standard police HR procedures.  It might surprise you that such procedures were not standard operating protocol to begin with.  After all, police have to operate cars at high speed and sometimes negotiate very careful situations.  It seems like a logical fit, but an argument can also be made that the police deserve our trust.

In any case, South Australia is intended to introduce mandatory testing for officers – and testing could be blood, urine, or hair.  I think this says at least two things, one about the hair drug test – it must be pretty accurate if it’s going to be used in such an official capacity!  And it is indeed very accurate.  Secondly, about the South Australian police – if they use hair, you know they care, because that type of testing offers an up to 90 day drug use history.  So that way you know the people on the job are not habitual drug users.  Urine drug testing can tell you if they are high at the moment, which is good, but hair drug testing allows you to find out if your employee is stable enough – can and did they go without drug use for a long period?  Is this person really drug free, or are they just clean for this test?

These are questions you can ask yourself in your own home as well.  There are a number of options when it comes to the hair follicle drug test.  But they all give you the unique power to ask and answer these types of questions.

So what do you think – should police be drug tested?  More or less frequently than other professions?  Or should they be exempt?  Drug testing is as always interesting and thought-provoking.

Drug Testing the Center of Debate in Kansas

Republican lawmakers in Kansas have come up with a proposal to screen welfare recipients for drug use.  There are a few proposals on the table, and they are not exactly new.  The Kansas House of Representatives passed a similar bill last year but the Senate of the state did not.  The lawmakers in charge of reviving such proposals are in the Senate.

One proposal would require drug testing all welfare recipients – around 44,000 people.  Another bill suggests people would only be tested if there was “reasonable cause” to believe they were using drugs.

It is perhaps a controversial issue, and the Springfield News Leader presents various perspectives in their article.  Do you agree that it would help people get jobs?  Is it an effective way of improving the quality of life among those on welfare?

A home drug test, administered by yourself or someone close to you, can be an effective way of ending drug abuse.  But is what is done at home necessarily appropriate on a federal scale?

There are lots of questions about drug testing, but no question that when used correctly it can even save lives – in situations like catching someone who has stumbled back into addiction with a hair drug test, or finding that someone is high on the job with a saliva drug test.  And these are just a few examples.

Why Can’t Hair Drug Tests Be Cheated? Find Out Here…

Home Health Testing strives to provide the most information about the tests we sell and what they test for.  On our main site we took a look at why hair drug tests can’t be cheated (you can read the full article at the link).  Basically we want everyone to know that our hair drug tests test what’s inside the hair – what you can’t get to with advertised shampoos and conditioners.  Sometimes the problem with drug tests is not that they aren’t accurate (they are) but that they can be faked.  With urine drug testing, people spike samples (or try to anyway) all the time.  It’s silly, but there you go.  Urine tests are certainly worth it for the range of drugs they can test (up to 12 at one time!), their value (the cheapest of all tests), and their decent detection time (a link to our chart).  Saliva drug testing is also a useful tool, because someone can take the test standing in front of you – it doesn’t have the same privacy issues as a urine-based test.

So don’t be daunted by all the “pass a drug test” sites that are out there!  Check out our article on hair follicle testing and learn more!