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From the State That Legalized Weed, Comes the World's Strongest Drug Test
BY TODD NEFF
The security guard is young, maybe mid-twenties, tall and wiry and armed. He’s friendly. He asks, “Good morning, sir. Recreational? Can I see your ID?” and directs me to the left, into a zig-zag of retractable belt barriers terminating at a long, well-lit counter.
Along the wall behind the counter is a grid of peg hooks not unlike those suspending Combos and corn nuts in roadside convenience stores. The bags here are transparent, their contents green, white-labelled with names like Blue Dream, Ghost Train Haze, Kool-Aid Kush and Industrial Paint. There are orange and red liquids in clear bottles; there are foodstuffs with names like Fantastic Brownie and Cheeba Chews; there are t-shirts, hoodies and beanies monogrammed with the Medicine Man logo.
When it’s my turn, Armando Rios greets me. He has short hair, a plaid button-down and a close-cropped goatee. Until recently he was a trimmer, he tells me, but is now a budtender. I grasp this slowly, only after mentally switching out the word “bud” for “bar.”
I tell him I’d like buy maybe a sixteenth of something with a crazy name, for a story I’m writing. He asks what it’s about. I tell him it’s about a drug test developed by CU Toxicology, a University of Colorado non-profit spinoff just down the road. I tell him that, in a single nine-minute run, it can test for 112 compounds in 500 drugs with ridiculous accuracy, and that it’s cheap. I tell him that the test can detect metabolites of THC, the active ingredient in all these bags of dope, with 20 times the sensitivity of the typical pee cup, turning negatives into positives for days post-toke.
I don’t tell him the test could reveal to your employer much more than a smoke sesh, that it produces an itemized grocery list of every chemical that entered your body, or that it could change the doctor-patient relationship for good.
Rios nods. “How about ‘Ogre’? A few of the budtenders highly recommend it. It’s more of a body high.”
Ogre. Perfect.
It’s $16 for the gram, $21.79 with tax. I pay in cash, and Rios seals the marijuana into a white, plastic mailing envelope, in a capped container that might otherwise hold takeout salad dressing. Behind me, a line of eight people has formed. It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday.
America is a nation of druggies. Comprising about 5% of the planet’s population, Americans smoke, pop, shoot and otherwise absorb 80% of the global opioid supply, 99% of the world’s hydrocodone (think Vicodin, Percocet, Percodan and Oxycontin) and two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs. The personal costs can be immeasurable (see Hoffman, Seymour Philip); the economic ones borderline unfathomable, approaching $200 billion a year, according to a 2011 U.S. Justice Department report. That’s about the Czech Republic’s GDP, up in smoke, down the hatch.
Among the major types of drug testing, the first and most familiar relates to pre-employment and employment-related testing. The second has to do with addiction and recovery, and the third with helping patients manage chronic pain. The fourth category, whose profile vastly exceeds its prevalence, has to do with sports-related drug testing of the sort happening before, during and after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Precisely 4,906 drug tests were projected for the Sochi games, according to organizers. Compare that to the estimated 486 million tests in the other three categories done in the United States alone in 2011, according to the Venture Planning Group – a number the firm expects to climb to 592 million by 2016.
And depending on a drug test's invasiveness and the person or company requesting it, medical privacy hangs in the balance.
Drug use can be tested in a few ways, most directly via the blood. But besides the issue of having to stab someone with a needle, drugs tend to leave the blood quickly – within a few hours. Hair testing is the opposite: A 1.5-inch-long snip of about 100 hairs can spot drugs taken in the last 90 days, but it doesn’t capture anything from the past week to 10 days. Spit testing is gaining traction, but like hair, oral fluids capture a limited number of compounds at detectable levels, and they move out of the mouth in 24 to 48 hours.
That leaves urine, the industry standard now and for the foreseeable future.
Most urine tests involve the pee cup or, more technically, a urine immunoassay using thin-layer chromatography, a technology that dates from the 1970s — the same used in pregnancy tests. They’re cheap — $5 wholesale and $20-$40 at retail drugstores (look for names like “TeenSaver”). They’re also relatively non-invasive, with no hair-snipping or blood-tapping needed, and they provide immediate feedback. They generally test for between 3 and 14 drugs, in other words, for smoking pot or blowing lines of cocaine.
But pee cups have their limits. Drug detection depends on the antibodies being the right shape to lock in a narrow set of antigens – in this case, drugs. Often, they sweep up a wider variety of molecules than intended, resulting in false positives and cross-reactions. The antidepressant trazodone or even vapor sprays like Vick’s can trigger a positive for amphetamines; naproxen, ibuprofen and riboflavin can masquerade as marijuana’s cannabinoids.
The technical term here is “specificity,” which refers to the ability of a drug test to discern what’s what in a sample. For pee cups, specificity isn’t great: a 14-panel cup has just one stripe for opiates, but there are dozens of very different opiates, from heroin to oxycodone. The stripe catches some and misses others.
Another pee cup weakness has to do with its sensitivity, or ability to detect tiny amounts of drug. Often, the cutoffs are high enough that drug users can take a couple of days off and pass a pee cup test.
On top of the shaky science, pee cup drug tests lack legal punch. If the little line marked “BZO” (for benzodiazepines) disappears, it’s merely a presumptive positive. In order to fire you, bust you or throw you out of a pain management program, testers will send your pee to a laboratory, where it’s run through a machine costing several hundred thousand dollars. The machine puts the urine through two gauntlets. The first uses either liquid or gas chromatography to separate compounds based on the drug molecules’ shape and reactivity. Then the compounds are ushered into a mass spectrometer, which blows them apart with ions and samples the colors of light emerging from their death throes. The colors divulge their precise nature – and with far more sensitivity than that of the initial pee cup.
On the other hand, pee cups won’t tell your employer about the prescription medications in your medicine cabinet.
continued http://mashable.com/2014/02/23/drug-test-marijuana-colorado/
BY TODD NEFF
The security guard is young, maybe mid-twenties, tall and wiry and armed. He’s friendly. He asks, “Good morning, sir. Recreational? Can I see your ID?” and directs me to the left, into a zig-zag of retractable belt barriers terminating at a long, well-lit counter.
Along the wall behind the counter is a grid of peg hooks not unlike those suspending Combos and corn nuts in roadside convenience stores. The bags here are transparent, their contents green, white-labelled with names like Blue Dream, Ghost Train Haze, Kool-Aid Kush and Industrial Paint. There are orange and red liquids in clear bottles; there are foodstuffs with names like Fantastic Brownie and Cheeba Chews; there are t-shirts, hoodies and beanies monogrammed with the Medicine Man logo.
When it’s my turn, Armando Rios greets me. He has short hair, a plaid button-down and a close-cropped goatee. Until recently he was a trimmer, he tells me, but is now a budtender. I grasp this slowly, only after mentally switching out the word “bud” for “bar.”
I tell him I’d like buy maybe a sixteenth of something with a crazy name, for a story I’m writing. He asks what it’s about. I tell him it’s about a drug test developed by CU Toxicology, a University of Colorado non-profit spinoff just down the road. I tell him that, in a single nine-minute run, it can test for 112 compounds in 500 drugs with ridiculous accuracy, and that it’s cheap. I tell him that the test can detect metabolites of THC, the active ingredient in all these bags of dope, with 20 times the sensitivity of the typical pee cup, turning negatives into positives for days post-toke.
I don’t tell him the test could reveal to your employer much more than a smoke sesh, that it produces an itemized grocery list of every chemical that entered your body, or that it could change the doctor-patient relationship for good.
Rios nods. “How about ‘Ogre’? A few of the budtenders highly recommend it. It’s more of a body high.”
Ogre. Perfect.
It’s $16 for the gram, $21.79 with tax. I pay in cash, and Rios seals the marijuana into a white, plastic mailing envelope, in a capped container that might otherwise hold takeout salad dressing. Behind me, a line of eight people has formed. It’s 11 a.m. on a Wednesday.
America is a nation of druggies. Comprising about 5% of the planet’s population, Americans smoke, pop, shoot and otherwise absorb 80% of the global opioid supply, 99% of the world’s hydrocodone (think Vicodin, Percocet, Percodan and Oxycontin) and two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs. The personal costs can be immeasurable (see Hoffman, Seymour Philip); the economic ones borderline unfathomable, approaching $200 billion a year, according to a 2011 U.S. Justice Department report. That’s about the Czech Republic’s GDP, up in smoke, down the hatch.
Among the major types of drug testing, the first and most familiar relates to pre-employment and employment-related testing. The second has to do with addiction and recovery, and the third with helping patients manage chronic pain. The fourth category, whose profile vastly exceeds its prevalence, has to do with sports-related drug testing of the sort happening before, during and after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Precisely 4,906 drug tests were projected for the Sochi games, according to organizers. Compare that to the estimated 486 million tests in the other three categories done in the United States alone in 2011, according to the Venture Planning Group – a number the firm expects to climb to 592 million by 2016.
And depending on a drug test's invasiveness and the person or company requesting it, medical privacy hangs in the balance.
Drug use can be tested in a few ways, most directly via the blood. But besides the issue of having to stab someone with a needle, drugs tend to leave the blood quickly – within a few hours. Hair testing is the opposite: A 1.5-inch-long snip of about 100 hairs can spot drugs taken in the last 90 days, but it doesn’t capture anything from the past week to 10 days. Spit testing is gaining traction, but like hair, oral fluids capture a limited number of compounds at detectable levels, and they move out of the mouth in 24 to 48 hours.
That leaves urine, the industry standard now and for the foreseeable future.
Most urine tests involve the pee cup or, more technically, a urine immunoassay using thin-layer chromatography, a technology that dates from the 1970s — the same used in pregnancy tests. They’re cheap — $5 wholesale and $20-$40 at retail drugstores (look for names like “TeenSaver”). They’re also relatively non-invasive, with no hair-snipping or blood-tapping needed, and they provide immediate feedback. They generally test for between 3 and 14 drugs, in other words, for smoking pot or blowing lines of cocaine.
But pee cups have their limits. Drug detection depends on the antibodies being the right shape to lock in a narrow set of antigens – in this case, drugs. Often, they sweep up a wider variety of molecules than intended, resulting in false positives and cross-reactions. The antidepressant trazodone or even vapor sprays like Vick’s can trigger a positive for amphetamines; naproxen, ibuprofen and riboflavin can masquerade as marijuana’s cannabinoids.
The technical term here is “specificity,” which refers to the ability of a drug test to discern what’s what in a sample. For pee cups, specificity isn’t great: a 14-panel cup has just one stripe for opiates, but there are dozens of very different opiates, from heroin to oxycodone. The stripe catches some and misses others.
Another pee cup weakness has to do with its sensitivity, or ability to detect tiny amounts of drug. Often, the cutoffs are high enough that drug users can take a couple of days off and pass a pee cup test.
On top of the shaky science, pee cup drug tests lack legal punch. If the little line marked “BZO” (for benzodiazepines) disappears, it’s merely a presumptive positive. In order to fire you, bust you or throw you out of a pain management program, testers will send your pee to a laboratory, where it’s run through a machine costing several hundred thousand dollars. The machine puts the urine through two gauntlets. The first uses either liquid or gas chromatography to separate compounds based on the drug molecules’ shape and reactivity. Then the compounds are ushered into a mass spectrometer, which blows them apart with ions and samples the colors of light emerging from their death throes. The colors divulge their precise nature – and with far more sensitivity than that of the initial pee cup.
On the other hand, pee cups won’t tell your employer about the prescription medications in your medicine cabinet.
continued http://mashable.com/2014/02/23/drug-test-marijuana-colorado/
