Cansford Labs - The Drug and Alcohol Testing Blog

In the UK, the demand for workplace drug and alcohol testing is on the rise. A 2017 article from theEuropean Pharmaceutical Review reveals that the UK testing market is worth £167m – a figure set to rise to £231m by 2019.

While much of the UK’s testing, they say, is used within child protection cases, “workplace drug and alcohol testing is an area of high growth and exciting potential”.

It’s certainly an area that we’re being approached about more frequently than before – and with that in mind, we sat down withFrank Bellwood from our business development team – and a police officer primarily on drug squads for 35 years before that - for his thoughts on the industries using workplace drug testing, the current testing legislation and the impact of implementing such programmes.

A robust collection process and accurate, timely, reliable results are crucial in the work we do. But important as they are, they’re not the only things that keep us in business.

Whether carrying out a single test or developing a longer term relationship, we want to give you - and your clients - an experience as easy, friendly and worry-free as possible.

That’s why we recently conducted qualitative research amongst clients past and present: to gauge what’s working well for our customers, what we could do better, and what matters most to them when testing for drugs and alcohol.

A 2018 report, commissioned by a cross-bench group of MPs and peers, revealed that between 2011 and 2014, alcohol was implicated in 37% of cases where a child died or suffered a serious injury resulting from abuse or neglect. Worryingly, over half of British councils have no plans in place to help and support the children of alcoholics.

Increasingly, though, courts and social care departments are using the Alcohol Abstinence and Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) as a means of improving outcomes from abstinence orders. An AAMR can be imposed in either family or criminals proceedings in the UK and requires the individual to enter a period of sobriety.

While cannabis is being legalised across the US and beyond, there’s no sign of it happening in the UK any time soon - at least, not for recreational use. Medicinal cannabis is a different matter: this summer, a 12-year-old in Northern Ireland was granted an emergency licence to treat his rare form of epilepsy with cannabis oil.

There are two forms of cannabis oil, CBD and THC: the former legal, the latter an illegal substance (and the oil that 12-year old Billy was prescribed). But what is the difference between the two, and should family lawyers, workplaces and social workers be testing for them?

For hair drug tests to stand up in court, you need to be sure that everything is done by the book. That means choosing an accredited lab, ensuring your client is prepared, a solid chain of custody, and accurate interpretation of the results.

Without these things, all of the money, time and client anxiety that a hair drug test involves may well be for nothing.

To explain how our collections process works and how it helps to resolve the challenges faced by our legal clients, we sat down with Chris Bell, head of our collections team, for his take on the process. Chris has been with Cansford Laboratories for six years, but has worked with our founder John Wicks since 2001. Before that, he ran the drug testing scheme for the Royal Navy, and having built the Cansford collections function from scratch, he’s the perfect person to explain how it all works.