There it was just sitting on the table. A line of cocaine and in a weak moment you snorted it.  You didn’t have a care in the world until you got to work on Monday and they told you that you were going to have to take a drug screen test.  Well, you thought, “I’ll just take a detox drink or some detox pills and I can pass no problem”.  That’s when your boss told you that it would be a hair test.  What to do now?  Cocaine metabolites can start to appear in your hair beginning as little as 8 hours after use to up to 4 to 5 days after use and can stay in the hair indefinitely until the hair is cut.

Hair tests are becoming more and more common in pre-employment and workplace drug screening.  This is because the hair test can go back as far as three months to see how naughty you’ve been.  When submitting samples for a hair test, follicles are most often gathered from the scalp.  Generally these are taken from the back of the head because this is where the most active growing region is.  In order to get an adequate sample approximately 100 strands of hair are taken.  The hair is cut as close to the scalp as possible.  The root end of the hair bundles are then aligned closely so that they can be accurately analyzed in the same time-line segments.  Your hair is then typically cut into one centimeter segments that represent approximately a one month time frame.  This will give the lab a correlation of what you ingested in what time frame.  Most hair tests cover approximately three months which would be about one and one half inches of hair since the average rate of hair growth is one half inch per month.  The sample is then washed to remove any oils or cosmetics.

Hair may be externally contaminated with cocaine but this type of contamination is usually checked for in the lab before proceeding with the hair test.  Hair tests analyze the contaminants inside the hair follicle so any external contaminants will have no effect on the results.  Body hair may be substituted for head hair if there is not enough hair on the subjects head for a proper sample.  Body hair has a different growth pattern than head hair so the time frame is up to one year when body hair is used for analysis.  If a subject has little or no hair at all including body hair then an in depth complete urine/adulteration testing method may be used.

So before you go decide to dabble with the Devil’s dandruff again think twice of the consequences or get yourself a good detox shampoo to rid yourself of the toxins that can remain in your hair long after the nose candy wears off.