Laboratory Techniques

Drug testing has become increasingly common in American life. Passing a drug screening test has become a prerequisite for employment in many companies, and some school systems have instituted drug testing policies as a requirement for participation in extracurricular activities. Other categories of people who may commonly encounter drug testing (beyond the obvious categories of persons who are incarcerated and/or enrolled in a drug treatment program) include those serving in the military, who participate in organized sports, require treatment in an emergency room, or come into contact with law enforcement authorities, for instance, by being involved in an automobile accident. Additionally, lab tests for the presence of poisons (e.g., arsenic) or drugs of abuse are often performed as part of a medical examiner's investigation into cause of death. Although much progress has been made in laboratory techniques to detect drug use, like all medical tests, the procedures of drug testing are imperfect and their results can be influenced by many factors besides whether the individual in question used the drugs for which he or she is being tested.

The technology to test bodily fluids for drugs has been available for only about 50 years, and was developed in response to a specific need that surfaced in the later years of the Vietnam War. By the late 1960s it was obvious that many U.S. servicemen returning to the United States after serving in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, and the military needed a quick and easy way to screen them for opiates so they could be referred for treatment. In 1970 the SYVA Company developed a technology known as free radical assay technique (FRAT) that could detect opiates in urine and allowed for rapid testing of returning servicemen. The FRAT technology, which measured the action of free radicals using an electron spin resonance spectrometer, was replaced a few years later by a simpler technique known as enzyme-multiplied immunoassay technique (EMIT), which relied on measuring an enzymatic action using a spectrophotometer.

Drug testing became more widespread in the United States in the 1980s, spurred in part by a deadly crash on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in 1981 that resulted in 14 deaths and 48 injuries. The crash investigation revealed that some of those involved in the accident had narcotics in their systems at the time of the crash, and this provided the impetus for the U.S. Navy to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward drugs. Part of the policy, since adopted by other branches of the armed services, was universal drug screening of new recruits, and “for cause” screening of current service members using urine testing. A serious [Page 458]passenger rail crash in 1987, in which the engineer and brakeman of one of the trains involved were revealed to have THC (the main active chemical in marijuana) in their system, led to the creation of federal guidelines for workplace drug testing. These “Mandatory Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing Programs,” issued by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in 1988, created the first comprehensive standards for drug testing and specified topics such as laboratory certification, dilution and adulteration of samples, specimen collection and handling procedures, screening levels, and confirmation and certification of test results.

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