Fascinating facts about drug testing and how it works
Chris Bell
on May 15, 2019
When it comes to a ‘hair strand drug test’ there are some key aspects you may find interesting to know and consider:
A hair strand drug test can actually give you a ‘drug use history’ over the length of time of the hair
The hair grows about 1cm a month, so each section of hair tested can tell its own story
You can even do a hair drug test on people who have been dead for years. We once tested a mummified Egyptian corpse (from about 2500BC) and found traces of cocaine.
Interestingly, coca plants are not grown in Egypt so we can hypothesise trans-continental travel was much earlier than most think!
Hair strand drug testing can only be done in a laboratory as the hair is ‘liquefied’ in order to discover the drugs it contains.
Even when people don’t have hair on their heads, other body hair can be tested
MI5 and MI6 reportedly have a habit of shaving a candidates left arm pit as part of their induction process
Between 3% and 5% of people working in the UK today would fail a drug test if it was taken today.
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