February 15, 1998

By Kim Cobb

While drug testing in public schools is still rare enough to make headlines, a growing number of private schools are finding that a tough policy, even if it intrudes on student privacy, is often a selling point for nervous parents.

The administrators of most private schools "don't fool around when it comes to discipline," says David Johns, president of the National Private Schools Association Group. "As far as discipline and managing social problems goes, they take the lead. They're little dictatorships, and they're successful. (Ed. note: Unlike large dictatorships that people don’t join voluntarily.)

"That's not compromising human rights and safety issues, that's guidance for young minds that need it," Johns said. How aggressively a private school chooses to enforce its drug policy often depends on the type of child they intend to serve as well as the desires of the parents.

At St. Thomas More High School, a private Catholic school with about 900 students in Lafayette, La., seven children a day are randomly selected for drug testing. The school guarantees that each child will be tested at least once during the school year, and a child who tests positive twice in a row will be expelled.

The policy is new this year, and principal Ray Simon says that about 95 percent of the parents embraced the concept when it was first presented, and not one parent has removed a child from the school as a result of the policy.

Simon believes that the method of testing they decided to use -- hair analysis -- is much less intrusive and embarrassing for teen-agers than the traditional urinalysis. William Thistle, general counsel for the company administering the hair analysis tests at St. Thomas More, said Psychemedics Corporation currently has about 30 schools as clients. (Ed. note: This may explain why short hair has become so popular.)

"Picture hair growth as a tape recorder," Thistle said. "As the hair grows out of your head, drug use is trapped in that hair folicle. As it grows out from your scalp, you have that record of drug use. "An inch and a half of hair represents about a three-month period," he said. Hair testing is more expensive than urinalysis -- about $50 per test vs. the average $25 to $30 for urinalysis. But advocates of hair analysis say the test is virtually impossible to beat.

"You can look on the Internet and find 100 products to adulterate your urine," Thistle said. "It's not lost on the drug user that if I'm using cocaine today I can be negative tomorrow by drinking water. I can be negative in 72 hours by doing nothing." (Ed. note: But not marijuana use!)

Under one Internet heading labeled, "Fooling the Bladder Cops," the drug user is advised on a long list of household items which do and don't work to skew the results of urinalysis, including dilution with water. At the extreme end of the spectrum, the site also advises that the subject can empty his bladder before the test and inject "clean" urine by syringe or catheter. (Ed. note: Don’t try this at home or anywhere else!)

"It is harder to cheat" a hair test, advises principal Simon. "The hair sample is taken, immediately put into a type of ziplock bag. And it's immediately initialed by the person taking the sample and by the student."

Scott Greenough, director of operations for Choicepoint Health and Safety Solutions, a company that administers urinalysis tests, said attempts to alter samples don't occur as often as conventional wisdom would lead people to believe. Even if the subject is allowed to collect his sample in private, an attendant at the collection site will usually check it for color and even temperature to guard against tampering. "I thinks it's safe to say there are ways for someone to beat any drug test, whether urinalysis, a hair test or saliva or any method," Greenough said. "But in the case of urinalysis, unless someone moonlighted as a chemist, it's not easy."

And while there are situations that can create a false positive result in urinalysis -- the ingestion of large amounts of poppy seeds is one of the better known factors -- most reliable labs will provide a more sophisticated, follow-up test after a subject tests positive, Greenough said. Hair testing is reportedly not subject to as high an incidence of false positives as urinalysis. But the two approaches differ in other ways, Greenough explained.

"Urinalysis provides a real time analysis of recent drug use," he said.

"The testing time frame will usually involve the use of illegal substances within one to seven days. (Ed. note: This is astonishingly wrong. See Why "Drug" Testing is Really Marijuana Testing. Marijuana metabolites can be detected many weeks after use.) Hair testing covers a much longer time frame but is less accurate for recent drug use because of the way the drugmetabolites are deposited in the hair follicle."

Copyright 1998 Houston Chronicle