Pulling the hair out of recruits: a guide to drug testing

Emma Harris, Police Accounts Manager at TrichoTech, a leading UK specialist in testing for substance misuse, writes about the different aspects of police drug testing policy and provides a guide to drug testing practice and procedures.

The issue of Home Office Instructions for drug testing within the police has meant that forces throughout the UK have had to revisit their testing policies and structure them specifically in line with the Home Office Procedures. The guidelines contain: the occasions for testing, drug groups to be tested and the sample types that can be used.

The simplest way to explore drug testing is by defining when testing should be carried out and the most appropriate sample for that testing occasion. The testing process is all about providing the answers to the questions posed by the Policy.

The most common types of workplace testing samples are saliva, urine & hair. Saliva is a very simple sample to take and gives a result, which shows what substances have been digested in the last 24 hours. Urine is a very common sampling method and has a longer window of detection, which gives a result for up to 4 days. Finally, hair testing provides the longest history of drug use with possible detection going up to 3 months history of substance usage. Each sample has an appropriate application throughout the testing cycle.

Recruitment: how do you prevent drug issues entering your force?

This stage of the testing process can be the simplest to deploy but is possibly the most crucial as it is the point at which police can do the most to reduce the risk of accepting habitual drug users into their force.

It is important to know as much about the candidate as possible before they enter into service and become the ‘face’ and responsibility of that force. Using a single hair test can provide a secure historical over-view of a recruit’s substance use. Hair analysis at the recruitment stage has been likened to checking the contents and references of an applicant’s CV. You wouldn’t rely on a three day CV so why would you rely on a three-day drug test?

Ingested drugs enter the blood stream and circulate around the body. Each hair follicle has its own blood supply, so that once the hair grows out of the head any substance taken by the individual is locked into the hair. The sample will give a result based on a period of months rather than days. This process will eliminate any regular drug users or addicts from the recruitment process as these types of users are far less likely to sustain the level of abstinence that is required to give a clean 3 month hair sample.

If a candidate is forewarned of a drug test and the sample to be taken is urine or saliva, they can abstain for up to 4 days (urine) and just 24 hours (saliva). This makes the testing process more of an ‘intelligence test’ than a drugs test. A hair test works on the principle that a centimetre of hair represents an approximate month’s record of substance abuse. For this testing situation, hair provides much more the reality about a candidate based on historical evidence. This coupled with stringent chain of custody procedures during the collection, testing and results procedure creates a solid and trustworthy assessment to base recruitment decisions on.

A large force in the UK used to use urine only to test for drugs. In over 4 years of testing less than a dozen samples proved positive out of thousands analysed. This is an unlikely scenario given the age group of the prime recruitment population (early 20’s) for which Home Office research indicates that more than 1 in 6 people are taking drugs regularly. It became evident through the higher level of positive random/unannounced testing results that at the recruitment stage, the urine samples were not an efficient method of detection for testing.

Eliminating a drug problem from the outset through effective screening of recruits could lead to less drug related incidents which are linked with the nec