Drug testing is an important part of the hiring process to ensure your employees are safe and healthy while on the job. The most common employer drug test is a urine drug test, but the detection time for urine testing is only a few days for most drugs, whereas a standard hair drug test can go back up to 90 days or even. Employers that are trying to get a broader picture of recent employee drug use should consider the advantages of hair follicle drug testing.

Ease of Access

Rather than having to urinate into a cup, extract blood, or have your mouth swabbed, a hair follicle drug test simply requires a small sample of hair. Approximately 90-120 strands are taken from a patient’s head, which is entirely non-invasive. In order to set up a hair follicle drug test, you can easily call up About My Health to place a lab order.

Fast, Reliable Results

While urine testing is often useful for detecting recent drug usage in response to workplace accidents or reasonable suspicion, hair follicle drug testing has a much wider window of detection. A hair drug test has a detection window of roughly 90 days, compared to a urine drug test’s 3-day detection window for most drugs.

The 5-panel hair follicle drug test is typically considered the “standard” and usually searches for a variety of drugs, such as cocaine, meth, marijuana, and opiates. However, there are many different hair drug test panels ranging from a 5 panel to a 19 panel. The cost for testing will increase as you add testing for more drugs. A 10-panel hair follicle drug test is a good, middle-of-the-road, comprehensive but good priced hair test. On top of all the advantages of hair follicle drug testing, these tests are relatively quick and will typically be returned to you within a business week.

“No cheat” drug test

Urine drug testing has been around a long time, which means people have had plenty of time to perfect ways to cheat a urine drug test. One of the advantages of hair follicle drug testing is that a person cannot pass a drug test by submitting fake urine. The hair drug test procedure requires the specimen donor to submit the sample right in front of the lab collector so submitting anything but the specimen donor’s own hair is impossible. Due to the length of detection for a hair drug test a person cannot simply stop using drugs for a few days so they test negative.