From the Federal
Times
January 26. 1998.
By Lisa Daniel Federal Times Staff Writer. Staff Writer Leigh Rivenbark contributed to
this report.
Letters:http://www.federaltimes.com/feedform.html
Website http://www.federaltimes.com/
US v. Gaines
Officials involved in workplace drug testing got a chilling reminder recently of the hazards of false readings.
Clinton administration officials are reviewing tests for marijuana after the acquittal of an Air Force master sergeant court-martialed for allegedly using the drug.
A military jury acquitted Master Sgt. Spencer Gaines in December after finding that an over-the-counter health product may have caused him to fail drug tests.
Gaines, a weight lifter stationed at Dover AFB, Del., testified that he began using Hemp Liquid Gold in 1996 as a replacement for essential fatty acids. He bought the product at a Washington, D.C. grocery store.
Gaines’ attorney, Charles Gittins, showed that hemp oil can cause positive marijuana readings.
A federal law passed in 1937 that made marijuana illegal excludes hemp oil and seeds from the definition of marijuana, effectively making such byproducts legal.
Regulations by the Drug Enforcement Agency, however, make tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a chemical ingredient of marijuana, illegal.
Federal drug tests consider THC levels above 15 nanograms to be indicative of marijuana use. Gaines’ THC level during a drug urinalysis last year was 28 nanograms, DoD tests showed. A test five months later put Gaines’ THC level at 35 nanograms, which led to the court-martial.
But after two government toxicologists testified that they did not know THC was in the Hemp Liquid Gold, Gittins argued that Gaines should not be held responsible.
The military jury agreed, but some civilians involved in drug testing do not.
An official with the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy and another with the Health and Human Services Department, both of whom asked not to be named, advocated a hard line on workplace drug testing.
"I know I can be randomly drug-tested at any time," the drug policy official said. "I watch very carefully what I use."
Those individual opinions reflect the mood of the federal government on marijuana issues.
After voters in California passed the so called "medical marijuana" law last year allowing prescription use of marijuana, the drug-control policy office and the Transportation Department responded that any use of an illicit drug, even with a prescription, violates federal drug-testing policy, the HHS official said.
An interagency group that meets regularly to discuss drug policy issues decided at a Jan. 15 meeting to do more scientific testing of hemp and its effects on marijuana readings, the official said.
Although the action is being taken because of the Gaines case, those who track drug policy have been looking into the problems for years, she said. This did not catch us by surprise at all," she said. We’ve been looking at hemp issues for a long time."
Some at the Jan. 15 meeting said they had done lab tests of hemp in which they got positive readings, then retested and got negative readings, the official said.
Agencies will use their scientific expertise to determine if changes need to be made to drug tests or policy, she said.
"We have issue an here, but we don’t know that we have a problem," she said. "The system may not be broken."
If there is a problem, the official acknowledged, "there could be huge implications" for agencies that do drug tests.
Of 111 agencies that reported drug-testing results between April and September 1995-the last calculation by the government - 49 agencies conducted 44,193 tests. Of those, 342, about eight-tenths of 1 percent, had positive use readings, HHS documents say. Of those who tested positive, 199, or 58 percent, were for marijuana; 96, or 28 percent, were for cocaine; 37, or 11 percent, were for amphetamines. Opiates and PCP showed up eight times each.
Some federal unions have long complained that the costs of conducting drug tests are not worth the few people who test positive.
The six-month reporting period in 1995 cost $4.9 million, or about $56 per person tested, HHS documents say.
Copyright © 1998 Army Times Publishing Company
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Title: Hemp oil ingestion causes positive urine tests for delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol carboxylic acid.
Source: Journal of Analytical Toxicology 1997 Oct;21(6):482-485 Authors: Costantino A, Schwartz RH, Kaplan P
American Medical Laboratory, Chantilly, Virginia 20151, USA.
Abstract:
A hemp oil product (Hemp Liquid Gold) was purchased from a specialty food store. Fifteen milliliters was consumed by seven adult volunteers. Urine samples were taken from the subjects before ingestion and at 8, 24, and 48 h after the dose was taken. All specimens were screened by enzyme immunoassay with SYVA EMIT II THC 20, THC 50, and THC 100 kits. The tetrahydrocannabinol carboxylic acid (THCA) concentration was determined on all samples by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) (5). A total of 18 postingestion samples were submitted. Fourteen of the samples screened above the 20-ng cutoff, seven were above the 50-ng cutoff, and two screened greater than the 100-ng cutoff. All of the postingestion samples showed the presence of THCA by GC-MS.
PMID: 9323529, UI: 97464816
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Title: Marijuana-Positive Urine Test Results From Consumption Of Hemp Seeds In Food