Faking A Hair Drug Test

Emergency services training

On this day, the fire is controlled. Trainers with Emergency Management Training and Services (EMTS) are showing the cadets how a fire burns, how to read smoke and, most important of all, how to get everyone out alive.

This group of cadets is all young men like Cameron Castello, a 23-year old whose father was a paramedic in Williamson County. Today is the first day of Castello’s training and the first day he and the other cadets have fought real fires.

“[It’s] amazing,” Castello said as he took a short break, dripping sweat with his gear peeled back. “It’s the best learning experience ever.”

The students are learning how fires work, watching flames build and seeing how layers of hot gases affect the way they have to attack a fire. They tackle various scenarios, from obstructed doors to rescuing unconscious victims.

All the while they deal with the twin heat of the blaze and the Texas sun. One cadet jokes they could open up their own weight-loss clinic in the “hot house,” taking “before” and “after” pictures in the same day.

EMTS training options

This is the first year EMTS has trained fire fighters. EMTS has been training other emergency services, including paramedics, for about 11 years. Instructors are all still active in the field, EMS Program Director Matt Nealand said, and come from nearby fire departments such as Round Rock.

EMTS has several options for the fire academy. Prospective firefighters can take the daytime class, which lasts for about 500 hours, taken 8 a.m.–5:30 p.m. five days a week for three months.

Those with jobs or other daytime commitments can also take a nighttime class two evenings a week and every other Saturday. This path takes nine months.

The only requirements for the program are a high school diploma or GED and passing a physical and a drug screening. Tuition is $3,500, but fees and gear rental can push the total cost upwards of $5,000.

The benefit of choosing EMTS, EMS Program Manager Laura Nealand said, is that the time and requirement barriers to entry are less than Austin Community College.

“What you get out of coming here is that you get into a class faster, you get certified faster, and … you are able to pursue the job hunt faster,” she said.

Police

The interior of a Round Rock police training room is eerily still. Police officers, each with a fake gun and a very real Taser at the ready, are poised and staring down plywood cutouts of a man with comically varied facial hair, a life-size variation of Wooly Willy meant to look tough.

Drug Testing Facts | Dreaming Life

Cheating is Widespread

While there’s no official numbers nor any real way to determine how many people are fooling drug tests, two figures available do point to how widespread and normal it is for people to “cheat” on their drug test:

In June 2010, a county program in Oregon responsible for dealing with drug tests (related to parole and probation) reported 20% to 30% of urine samples submitted were suspected as adulterated with either dillution products or substitution urine – either fake urine , someone elses urine, or in one case, elk urine. Brilliant. From 2008 to 2010, Legacy health Central Lab in Portland, Oregon reports 1%-2.5% of urine samples given to them were actually composed of synthetic urine.

The irony with this type of data collection is that of course these labs have no way of reporting on all the other samples that they did not identify as fake or adulterated. How Did This Nonsense Start Anyway?

We can thank Ronald Reagan for making drug testing such a normal part of getting (and keeping) a job. In 1986 he signed Executive Order 12564 which led to drug testing for federal workers.

This started the slippery slope into both the public and private job sectors, propelled forward by a 1989 court ruling that made it okay for employers to give a drug test to employees without cause or suspicion after it was determined that such tests did not

BTW – Get Paid For Your Time, Eh?

Suprisingly, the law support the idea of compensenting employees for the time they spent taking the drug test. You can about this here and here. In effect, the US Dept. of Labor says that if a company requires you to do something as part of your job – such as a drug test or a physical – the time you spend taking the test is to be considered hours worked. Amazingly, even the time it took you to drive there and back and any waiting around in the doctors office is all on the clock.

Side note: I’ve had to take 3 employment drug tests and it has never been compensated by the company, nor was it ever addressed one way or another. I suspect that if a company doesn’t want to compensate you in this way, there’s little real world action an employee can take. At this point, he or she often doesn’t even have the job or has just started – making it very shakey ground to start a battle over.

BUT – it rarely does. For one thing, because the length of the hair sample is inherently mapped to the past time length that can be looked at, it doesn’t really make sense for companies to mandate year long tests. That would require about 6 inches of hair.