How To Pass A Drug Test - Just Choose Your Level.

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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,'' says Sherri Vogler, who runs Houston Medical Testing Service, a specimen collection company.  ``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.''

Most aren't using

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 has 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 own employees over the next year to include saliva, hair and sweat.  Some private employers already have 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 already are fueling a new round of cat-and-mouse, as companies who specialize in beating tests scramble to market products they claim 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, chairman of the American Association of Medical Review Officers, says with grudging admiration.

But as new types of tests have gained acceptance in the past few years, Spectrum also has begun looking beyond urine.  The company now sells nine different products, including Get Clean Shampoo intended to counteract hair tests and Quick Fizz tablets for saliva tests.

``It's not about defrauding anybody,'' Wilson said of his company's products.  ``It's about protecting privacy, because people have no privacy anymore.''

The constant transformations by Spectrum and companies like it have 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 been only 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.

Catching fakers

Labs and firms that make the testing technology say they've worked aggressively to screen out cheaters who use substitute urine or adulterants.

Quest Diagnostics, 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, 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.

``I think as the alternative matrices grow in their application in the industry and in the workforce, you will see more varied types of products that are available to attempt to help a donor cheat on their test,'' he said.

 
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