Sample preparation techniques

Abstract

Evidentiary false positives are caused by passive exposure to drugs in the environment rather than by active use of drugs. The avoidance of such positives is essential for both hair and urine analysis. Hair analysis enjoys the advantage over urinalysis in having a number of approaches for making this distinction. These include: methylene blue staining of the hair specimen for selecting the appropriate wash solvent; application of hair digestion techniques for the complete release of chemically unaltered analytes; the determination of three diagnostic ratios from wash and digestion data; the measurement of metabolite:drug ratios; the use of cut-off levels setting the limits for passive endogenous drug exposure; reproducibility of results (including segmental analysis) with a newly collected hair specimen; and the reporting of results as either negative, positive, or contaminated. Our sample preparation procedures have been effectively applied to the analyses of nearly 200,000 specimens, i.e. to approximately one million drug analyses for cocaine, opiates, methamphetamine, phencyclidine or marijuana. On the basis of this experience we conclude that hair analysis is a safe and effective method for workplace drug testing.