The legal status of cannabis in the United States is one of uneasy transition. In 2012, Colorado and Washington state made history when they put legalization on the ballot—and legalization won. In subsequent years, 12 more states, the District of Columbia, and 2 overseas territories would follow, legalizing cannabis use through either referendum or an act of the state legislature. Meanwhile, 36 states, D.C., and 4 territories have permitted marijuana for medical treatment.

This all sounds very progressive, but there’s a catch—cannabis remains illegal at the federal level. Not only does federal law prohibit its use, but it designates cannabis as a “Schedule I controlled substance.” This means that the Food and Drug Administration sees it as being highly addictive with no legitimate therapeutic value. That makes a very large messaging gap between state and federal governments, and it can make drug testing quite complicated for subjects who hold medical marijuana cards. If you’re in this position, here’s what you need to know about drug testing with a medical card.

State-by-State Discrepancies

The state of flux between what is legal and what is permissible also exists between state law and workplace regulations, and the piecemeal, state-by-state basis by which marijuana has gradually become legal doesn’t make things clearer for users. For instance, in Illinois, which passed both medical and recreational cannabis use by legislative bill, employers cannot terminate employees in good standing who test positive while holding a valid medical card. In other states, however, this protection doesn’t exist. Employers in these states are free to fire workers who test positive even if they have a valid card and even if they have not demonstrated impairment on the job.

Medical Marijuana & the Department of Transportation

The federal Department of Transportation has long held stringent requirements for a drug-free workforce. People who work under the auspices of the DOT, including not only federal employees but also all holders of commercial driver’s licenses and other workers in “safety-sensitive” transportation work, must submit to and pass the DOT’s drug test. This includes a marijuana panel. Because federal law supersedes state law, a state-issued medical marijuana card is not enough to invalidate testing positive for THC on a DOT test. Even with a card, you’ll have to pass this test to procure or maintain employment under DOT regulations.

Know Your Rights

When it comes to what you need to know about drug testing with a medical card, the best approach is to consult both your employee handbook and state laws to determine just how tenuous medical marijuana use is in your state and position. Before undertaking a 10-panel hair follicle drug test, which does include THC metabolites as one of its panels, know that you do have legal recourse to contest a termination that comes from testing positive while holding a valid card. Make yourself familiar with the intricacies—federal law and the subsequent confusion seem unlikely to change.

If you’re considering or are planning on participating in a hair follicle drug test, there are a few things to consider. Your hair length may affect the results, or you might be unable to use this form of drug test. Learn what happens when your hair is too short for a drug test in this article.

For more drug testing information or to set up a business profile for your company and get a drug test lab order, simply call customer service at (877) 731-6377.

If the Person Has Short Hair

If the test-taker has short hair, the hair can still function for a follicle drug test. When hair is short, the sample collected simply must cover a larger portion of the person’s head. This ensures there is enough hair to test with. No hair is too short for this type of test as the sample area can grow to fill in the gaps.

If the Person Has a Shaved Head

If the tester shaves their head or is bald, then the hair sample taken cannot be from their head. The hair sample for the follicle drug test can be taken from their body hair. Again, even if it’s short, there is always the option to take a larger portion of hair for the test.

If the Person Has No Body Hair at All

If the person being tested has no body hair whatsoever then the hair follicle test cannot properly function. This is one of the few scenarios where a hair follicle test is not an option and cannot be completed. While it’s rare, this can happen. In these scenarios, a different drug test is recommended.

If you’re still wondering what happens when your hair is too short for a drug test or if you have other concerns, contact us at About My Health. We provide reliable, top-quality hair follicle tests for alcohol and much more.

The most common drug tests used today include hair, urine, and nail sample tests. While hair and urine tests are reliable options, they’re limited in their scope of test results and only show results within days of substance abuse. Here are four reasons why a fingernail drug test might be needed as an alternative.

Not Enough of a Hair Sample

One of the primary reasons employers opt for a fingernail drug test is due to a lack of available scalp hair for a hair test. Hair tests may also use samples from body hair, pubic hair, and facial hair, but anyone trimmed or unable to provide a substantial hair sample may not have enough of a supply to conduct a valid test. More so, certain individuals, such as those with alopecia, have no body hair to provide. Therefore, a fingernail test is the next reliable alternative.

Not Enough of a Urine Sample

Alternatively, drug tests are nerve-racking experiences, and those with sensitive bladders may not be suitable for a urinalysis test. In the case of urinalysis drug tests, employees may not be able to urinate on command, thus negating the test. Additionally, urine analyses have a limited time frame that only shows drug use within days of the test.

Test for Different Substances

While there are different drug test panels to test for many substances, fingernail tests can test for more substances than a typical urine analysis or hair sample. A fingernail alcohol test will test for alcohol via fingernails and toenails. There’s almost a guaranteed sample assuming the employee did not cut their nails beforehand. Some nail tests further test for amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, opiates, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, methadone, oxycodone, fentanyl, ketamine, and more. The panel size of the test determines the number of substances it tests.

Can Test Within Months of Use

The last reason why a fingernail drug test might be needed is that it tests for longer substance use than alternative tests. Hair and urine drug tests typically have a shorter window of detection. Fingernail tests, on the other hand, can detect drugs for 3 or even 6 months of use. This can prove more reliable to indicate long-term substance abuse in employees who attempt to navigate a test by forgoing use of a drug within days of the test.

AMH Nationwide offers nail tests for alcohol to spot alcohol abuse within months of use. These alcohol fingernail tests use samples from fingernails and toenails and provide results within an estimated one to seven business days, although the average usually falls between three to five business days. The alcohol fingernail test detects use from fingernail samples within an estimated three to six months of potential usage. Toenail samples may detect use within one year. Prices on these tests vary, so call now to learn more about our nail tests. Keep in mind that it takes one to two weeks for alcohol abuse to show in a nail sample, and environmental factors may affect results.

We have many ways of testing for alcohol consumption, tests which vary in immediacy and efficacy. A breathalyzer test can tell law enforcement whether you’ve been drinking that night, while a urine test indicates whether you’ve had a drink in the last few days. Once indicators are present, a fingernail test can detect alcohol consumption for nearly six months. That’s the key, though—once indicators are present. How long does it take for alcohol to show up in fingernails once the person has had a few drinks? We’ll explain in today’s post.

The Fingernail Advantage

Even though hair testing is a popular means of testing for EtG, the biomarker that indicates the metabolization of alcohol, fingernail testing presents a formidable alternative. It probably doesn’t cross your mind as you’re washing your hair in the morning, but hair and fingernails are made of the same substance—keratin, the fibrous protein that serves as a building block of our bodies. In fact, elsewhere in the animal kingdom, things such as bird feathers and rhinoceros horns are also made of keratin.

The difference between the keratin in our hair and the keratin in our nails is that the strands of proteins in our nails are about four times thicker than those on our heads. With that reinforced strength comes a greater capacity for absorbing biomarkers between fibers of keratin. If hair does a good job locking in the indicators of drug and alcohol consumption, the heavy fibrous strands of fingernails are practically the Alcatraz of biomarkers—once they get in, they’re not getting out.

The Window for Testing

Now we know that fingernails are particularly adept at collecting indicators of chemical consumption. The question remains, then: how long does it take for alcohol to show up in fingernails? While it doesn’t take place immediately, it may happen sooner than you think. As you should know, it takes the body roughly one hour to process a standard alcoholic beverage. From there, it takes an additional 24 hours for alcohol to leave the body completely. As it does, remnants of that metabolization process stay in the body for days, after which they eventually leave the body via sweat. Fingernails and toenails absorb this metabolite, ethyl glucuronide, about one week after initial consumption. Once keratin captures sufficient EtG, it can remain in detectable quantities for as long as 180 days.

A Closer Look at Fingernail Testing

Nearly everyone enjoys the occasional alcoholic beverage. This legal and generally safe usage pattern is one that even the reliable traps of fingernail fibers sometimes struggle with. If the goal of a test is to ascertain absolute abstinence, you may not find that a nail test indicates mild usage. However, when it comes to moderate drinking, sustained heavy drinking, or short bursts of binge drinking, there will be enough EtG present for enough time to indicate a problematic relationship with alcohol. Our fingernail alcohol test calls for 100 mg of fingernails or toenails—one or the other, please. Results of this test should return in about five business days.

It’s a ritual we’ve seen come out of Hollywood or undergone ourselves: passing a drug test as the final condition of getting a job. While not a requirement for every position, many employers do insist on a drug test, even as a mere formality, if only to cover all their bases. But what drug test is most popular for pre-employment? Here are some of the most common methods.

5-Panel Urinalysis

Perhaps the drug test we best recognize as a precondition of employment is the five-panel urine test. This is the most common pre-employment test in both the public and private sectors. Usually a simple and discreet procedure, it requires prospective employees to submit a urine sample of between 30 to 45 milliliters (mL). The five-panel test will screen for the presence of opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamine, and phencyclidine. A urine test can detect drug and metabolites of these drugs in a sample, but only within a relatively brief period—between 1 to 3 days for most drugs. Marijuana will show in a urine test much longer depending on how heavy the usage is and also how quickly a person metabolizes things. While a cottage industry has sprung up around foiling urine tests with fake fluids, the testing industry has responded in kind, whether by increasing oversight at test sites or by detecting phony urine at the lab, leading to an automatic failure of the test.

Saliva Testing

An increasingly popular means of testing new hires before the ink is dry on the contract is by administering oral fluid drug tests. Less intrusive than providing a urine sample for many people, a saliva test requires one to swab the inside of a subject’s mouth and submit the swab to the lab. Given how many people eagerly submit their own saliva samples to participate in genealogy reports, there is rarely an objection to this test. While it is much less intrusive, it is also less effective, with a shorter detection window than a urine test. For instance, a saliva test may only be able to detect THC within the last 48 hours.

Hair Testing

When employers insist upon ensuring that their new employees have as pristine a record of drug abstinence as possible, they will go for the most comprehensive and foolproof testing mechanism available. A 10-panel hair follicle drug test screens for an expanded range of illegal and commonly abused drugs and offers a testing period of at least 90 days, elucidating habitual drug use while other modalities of testing allow people to clean up long enough to beat the test. This drug test is most popular for pre-employment in industries involving heavy machinery, where drug abuse is unacceptable. A hair test requires subjects to cut and submit a sample of head or body hair, which the lab will then screen for, detecting metabolites across the following ten panels:

• Amphetamines
• Barbiturates
• Benzodiazepines
• Cannabis
• Cocaine
• Methadone
• Methaqualone
• Opioids
• Phencyclidine (PCP)
• Propoxyphene

When hair is not available, a nail test can serve the same function, and for even more thorough testing, 17-panel tests are available as well.

Some people in this world are always looking for a loophole. When you’re a lawyer, this can be a valuable talent. When you need to take a drug test, though, what you think is a loophole may really be a snare.

Increasingly, when courts and employers ask subjects to complete a drug test, the method they prefer is the hair follicle test. This features a detection window of about 90 days. Test subjects wary of false positives or even true positives can be quite inventive in trying to find a loophole to the test’s requirements. Some will use special “detoxifying” shampoos that purport to remove all traces of drug metabolites from the hair. They don’t work. Others will even go so far as to shave their heads and bodies to leave the lab with no hair to test. Another common but misled method is to bleach or dye one’s hair in hopes of throwing off testers. But can hair dye throw off a hair follicle test? It can’t, and here’s why.

Don’t Go Dark

It may occur to you to cover up your hair, so to speak, with jet-black hair dye. Because it’s the darkest and richest hair color, it should cover up any residual evidence of drug use in theory. Unfortunately for would-be loophole-seekers, it doesn’t work this way. The presence of hair dye doesn’t affect the presence of metabolites that lie deep within the strand. Even with your lovely new hair color, laboratories will be able to detect the presence of numerous illegal and commonly abused drugs within a hair sample.

Bleaching Can’t Do It All

Some test subjects may try to move in the other direction—bleaching their hair blonde. After all, a powerful solvent should be able to remove metabolites, right? Yes and no. Bleaching damages the hair shaft, and in doing that damage, the metabolites in the hair can leach out. This might diminish levels but not make you pass your drug test.

What Would Happen if I Tried?

If you must take a 17-panel drug test that calls for a hair sample, be honest. Simply submit your hair sample without attempting to determine whether hair dye can throw off a hair follicle test. If you should try to bleach your hair so extensively as to render your hair sample unusable, you will not pass the test on the technicality of having an insufficient sample. Instead, you may need to give your body hair, which is a far more invasive request than asking for hair from your head. You may also have to take a fingernail test, which measures the presence of metabolites within keratin. The worst-case scenario is simply that your skullduggery causes you to fail the test altogether, leaving you with bleached blonde hair and the blemish of a failed drug test.

For more information on sample collection hours and drug testing, simply call us at (877) 731-6377.

As a manager of personnel, you expect a drug-free workforce, not only for legal compliance but for job performance. Unfortunately, life goes on off the clock, and even your best employees can fall victim to addictions that carry on into work hours. Whether it’s cocaine, opioids, or even alcohol, substance abuse can drastically affect safety and productivity in the workplace. To know when to step in, learn how to recognize some of the various signs of substance abuse in employees.

Frequent Unexcused Absences

Whether you have a rigid punch-in-punch-out approach to attendance or take a more casual tack, the bottom line is that you need your employees at work and working each day. When employees’ attendance starts to slip to the point where even a laissez-faire attendance policy can’t excuse a lack of timely appearances, you have cause for concern. Frequent tardiness or absences are often indicative of lifestyle issues that conflict with the rigors of regular work. Whether it’s school or work, you need to be there to succeed.

Poor Performance

In tandem with poor attendance often comes poor performance. A worker doesn’t have to crash a piece of construction equipment to show that they’re suffering from substance abuse while they’re on the job. Poor work performance can reveal itself in missed deadlines, decreased productivity, or even an influx of slapdash, hastily completed work that makes more work for others.

Change in Mood

Over time, you get to know your employees and their various personalities and temperaments. Together, the different character traits they bring to the table make for a well-rounded workforce. It should be notable, then, when a once-gregarious employee becomes sullen and reserved, or someone you relied on for an even keel becomes edgy and erratic. If you notice marked personality changes in employees that you might reasonably attribute to substance abuse, it’s worth checking in to see why.

Uncharacteristic Financial Decisions

Drug addiction is not only a physically deleterious condition but a financially costly one as well. Over time, funding a habit will begin to manifest itself in a person’s financial status, which you as an employer may be able to witness. You may see an employee who was once fiscally prudent start making out-of-character requests, such as advances on paychecks or premature withdrawals from 401(k) plans or IRAs. You may discover secondhand that an employee has been asking co-workers for loans. While this doesn’t indicate a drug addiction in and of itself—immediate financial hardship can strike any of us at any time—it can be a warning sign of substance abuse when it occurs in concert with other suspicious changes.

Upon identifying any of the various signs of substance abuse in employees, what should you do as a manager? While it may seem like an imposition on your employees’ privacy, if you have reasonable suspicion that employees are abusing drugs and alcohol to such an extent that it affects their job performance, a drug test may be necessary. Our services can help you to order a drug test online and identify the root causes of performance issues in your workforce.

When you think of testing for alcohol consumption, one device immediately comes to mind. You know it best as the breathalyzer, a common feature of roadside field sobriety tests. Through a process that converts residual ethanol on one’s breath to acetic acid, law enforcement can estimate the test subject’s blood alcohol content, with a particular eye toward the .08 BAC that serves as the legal limit in most states.

It’s a handy device, but one that is limited in scope. A breathalyzer can only measure alcohol consumption within a short time frame—roughly the last 12 hours. And testing for alcohol consumption goes far beyond the side of the road. The court may require people who are embattled in child-custody proceedings or enrolled in substance abuse programs to submit to tests that measure alcohol consumption within timeframes that stretch well beyond what breath, blood, or urine can accurately report. For this, courts prefer a hair follicle test, which offers results from the last 90 days. Multi-panel hair tests can detect 5-17 drugs, but alcohol is not among them. So how do hair follicle tests detect alcohol consumption? We’ll take a closer look.

For more employer hair follicle drug testing information or to set up a business profile for your company and get a drug test lab order, simply call customer service at (877) 731-6377.

What’s “EtG”?

The process begins in the liver. Ethanol, which we refer to in common parlance as “alcohol,” is a complex molecule of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen that the liver breaks down. As the liver metabolizes ethanol, a substance known as glucuronic acid aids in the process, where it creates a metabolite, or byproduct, called ethyl glucuronide, or EtG. As the body excretes these metabolites through sweat, hair absorbs them, where they can remain for months.

Testing Procedure

A hair follicle test takes 90-120 hairs for sampling—usually from the head, but if that is not an option, body hair is a viable alternative. A laboratory will assess the sample for the presence of EtG. While certain events can cause false positives, such as the use of mouthwash or hair products that include ethanol, these are unlikely, and a hair test is indeed a reliable means of testing for recent alcohol consumption. A hair follicle test can detect the metabolization of ethanol within the last 90 days.

In Closing

The most important thing to know about how hair follicle tests detect alcohol is that they’re hard to beat. Washing your hair or taking a dip in the pool on the day of your test is not enough to remove traces of EtG from your hair. Shaving your head to eliminate hair samples could only lead to more invasive sampling or forfeiture of the test. Indeed, the only way to pass an EtG hair follicle test is to do what you were supposed to do: abstain.

Courts and employers have several modalities of drug testing at their disposal in order to ascertain whether prospective employees, people under supervision or probation, or those dealing with divorce and child custody related drug testing are remaining drug-free.

While blood, saliva, and urine tests are often uncomfortably invasive and offer relatively short windows of detection, hair follicle testing offers both a minimally invasive sampling procedure and a standard 90-day window (or further if using body hair or segmented hair drugs tests going beyond the 90 days) to detect a variety of illegal and illicit drugs. Hair tests can be specific or wide-ranging, and while there are some reliable basics across different offerings, what can be detected by a hair follicle drug test can vary depending on the type of test.

The Basics

Detecting the use of the most common illegal or abused drugs is the primary objective of any hair drug test. Even the most basic hair test will find indications of cannabis, cocaine, popular opiates such as heroin, a wide range of amphetamines, and PCP. As the body metabolizes these drugs, it excretes byproducts of that process through sweat, which the hair then reabsorbs. A hair sample of 1 ½ to 2 inches will account for roughly three months of this process. A hair test screens for a number of drugs or drug groups. This can be as few as the five drugs mentioned above or as many as 19.

Alcohol: Testable, But Not a Panel

Alcohol is perhaps the most used and abused intoxicant in America. However, you won’t find it included in a traditional multi-panel drug test. Testing for ethyl glucuronide (EtG) requires a separate testing protocol. Hair testing for alcohol can now be provided, as well as urine EtG testing and even fingernail and toenail EtG testing.

Ten-Panel Tests: Expansive Hair Testing

Civil servants who are responsible for safely operating heavy equipment and protecting the safety of others must successfully pass a ten-panel hair follicle drug test. Our standard ten-panel test identifies metabolites of the following substances and substance groups:

• Cannabis
• Amphetamines and methamphetamine
• Cocaine
• Prescription opiates
• Phencyclidine (PCP, or angel dust)
• Benzodiazepines
• Barbiturates
• Methadone
• Propoxyphene
• Oxycodone

Some of what can be detected by a hair follicle drug test with ten or more panels may not be readily familiar. Propoxyphene, short for dextropropoxyphene, is a fully synthetic opioid whose metabolites do not register under the panel for traditional opium-derived opiates. Oxycodone, better known under its extended-release trade name, OxyContin, is another opioid that warrants individual scrutiny. Methadone, while it has analgesic properties of its own, finds its most common use as a treatment method for opioid addiction. Its appearance on a drug test result could be indicative of larger abuse patterns.

No Cheating!

One of the most important things people giving and taking hair tests should know is that there’s no fooling a test—not by shampooing, bleaching, or shaving. Having insufficient hair to submit does not allow one to pass on a technicality. The only way to pass a ten-panel hair test is to abstain from the aforementioned drugs.