Want To Pass Drug Test? Some Businesses Show Ways
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Attention robbers and job seekers! Here’s a service you won’t find in any other newspaper, only in the New York Sun: Advance notice of a sting.
Unsuccessful robbers (otherwise known as parolees): if you use those growing numbers of “quick flush” herbal tonics to “cleanse” your urine to prove to your parole officer that you are free of cocaine, heroine or even marijuana, you may be in for a surprise. A law enforcement agency (we aren’t going to be all that specific) said yesterday that it has taken notice of those sales, and is checking whether some stings might be legal or useful.
If it comes to pass, the question is would they find the drug user, or the intellectually challenged?
An even better question is do the products sold in New York as “guaranteed” to let you pass the drug test actually work to help people like prospective employees get over a very common hurdle in the business world – to say nothing of parolees.
“Read the label,” said drug expert Dr. Barry Sample of the Teterboro based Quest Diagnostics, the nation’s largest testing company. “They usually tell you to drink a lot of water: first drink water, then take the product and then drink water.”
“It’s not the product that works, it is the water,” he said. “They could save themselves $50.”
Actually it is between $69 and $139, but who’s counting.
Dr. Sample said in the trade, the word is, “the solution to pollution is dilution.”
As predicted, one box selected by the Sun advised customers to drink water, the bottle of the product, and more water. Another advised drinking the enclosed tea steadily for three straight hours before the urine test. So water works? Not really. Dr. Sample said Quest and the other laboratories can report back to the prospective employer that the submitted sample is diluted. “In the case of a prospective employee, the employer usually decides not to go through the cost and trouble of another test,” he said. Some products actively block the signs of drugs, he said, but using that is an even worse idea. Quest and other diagnostic companies can detect the blocking agents, and can report that the specimen was adulterated. “That’s worse because it shows that the person knew he had a problem and tried to hide it,” Dr. Sample said. Conclusion: don’t bother with the sting. It’s probably not legal anyway.
