Pubdate: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 Source: Winston-Salem Journal (NC) Copyright: 2004 Piedmont Publishing Co. Inc. Contact: http://www.journalnow.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/504 Note: The Journal does not publish letters from writers outside its daily home delivery circulation area. Author: Associated Press Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing) 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.'"