News | Feature Article

Parents Add Drug Tests To Shopping Lists
Sales Rise for Kits That Detect Pot, Ecstasy and Cocaine; Taking a Teen's hair Sample

by Hilary Stout of the Wall Street Journal

She is never quite sure when it will happen.

Sometimes it's first thing in the morning. Sometimes it is after she comes home from a friend's house at night. Once it happened when one of her best friends was over and the two were sitting quietly at the computer. No matter what she's doing, 15-year-ld Taylor Hancock knows at any moment there is a chance her mother will hand her a plastic cup, send her to the bathroom to urinate in it, then dip little tabs into the liquid to check whether the ninth-grader has been using drugs.

Taylor's mother, Jan, buys home drug-testing kits in bulk, either on the Web or at a local pharmacy in Phoenix, to use on Taylor and her 18-year-old brother, Hunter. Sometimes the kids are clean. other times they test positive and Ms. Hancock punishes them. After a test indicated Taylor had smoked marijuana last summer, her mother barred her from going on a long-planned trip to Florida with a friend's family.

Worrying and wondering is pat of the parental condition: is she doing drugs? Will there be booze after the prom? But though past generations could only fret over such questions, parents of adolescent kids today have a growing array of tools at their disposal to actually find out the answers.

Testing Your Teens

Some home drug and alcohol testing kits on the market:

While the first home drug-testing kits and alcohol breathalyzers came on the market about five years ago, these products - which started with law enforcement, then moved into the workplace - are increasingly seeping into family life. Nationwide sales of home drug-testing kits have nearly doubled since 2003, to over $20 million in the year ended in march, according to Information Resources Inc., a market-research firm. Q3 Innovations, which makes home breathalyzers (ranging from $59.99 to $139.99), has seen sales double every year since it introduced its first model five years ago.

All major drugstore chains and places like Wal-mart now offer urine test kits that can detect marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and a variety of other drugs. Phamatch is now pushing to get its QuickScreen At Home kits, which retail for between $14.95 and $29.95, on the shelves of a number of food store chains as well.

And some companies are now offering more user-friendly types of tests. Psychemedics Corp. now offers home test kits using hair samples - which can be less awkward than asking for urine specimens and are less susceptible to tampering - though the samples must be sent to a lab for analysis.

While those tests are overt, there is an increasing variety of stealth means to keep tabs on teens, too, from peeking at their emails to reading their blogs. you can check their cell phone to find out the numbers they've been calling - and who's been calling them. you can buy devices for your car that tell precisely where it's being driven, and how fast.

"the technology for monitoring family members is robust and it's getting stronger all the time," says Robert McCie, professor of security management at John jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The result is a growing dilemma of modern parenthood: Should you actually do it?

Matter of Trust

The majority of parents, of course, haven't gone to such extremes as testing for drugs. For some parents who once experimented with drugs themselves, the prospect of betraying a child's trust is more upsetting than drug use. But, for others testing is smart, prudent measure. After all, even drugs considered relatively mild, like marijuana, are considerably more potent today than in years past.

For many, the decision to test or not really comes down to a weighing of trust vs. safety. Steve Sherrts of Independence, Iowa, and his wife were terrified of the prospect of their teenage kids drinking and driving. "We knew people who'd gotten killed," Mr. Sherrets says. One day they sat their two boys down and said they were thinking about buying a home breathalyzer. "i said, "This isn't to catch you - hopefully it will be a deterrent," Mr. Sherrets says.

They use their Alcohawk breathalyzer randomly - sometimes three nights in a row, sometimes not for three weeks. Only once has one of their boys tested positive - after a prep rally and bonfire.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The Hancock family's experience shows both the strengths and the shortcomings of testing. ms. hancock, a divorced 44-year-old who works in marketing at a Fortune 500 company, began testing her son after he was caught smoking marijuana. Though she had no reason to believe hr daughter was involved with drugs, she decided to start testing her, too, with the support, she says, of her ex-husband. "I told her it was to keep her from making bad choices, from succumbing to peer pressure," Ms. Hancock says.

Still, she hasn't consistently stayed away from drugs. About a year ago, she says she started to get curious about marijuana and other drugs. She tried pot with her friends and then "some pills," she says - knowing she would be caught. Now, she says if her mother didn't test her all the time, she'd probably do drugs more often. her mother believes that, too.

People in the addiction and drug prevention field have mixed feelings about testing. They note that there can be problems with accuracy. Though parents like the surprise element of springing a test on kids at varying ties of day, that practice may not yield the most accurate results. Ken Adams, president of Home Health Testing, a unit of Melbourne, Fla-based AB Diagnostics, Inc., says it's best to test as soon as they wake up, since the first urine of the morning is the strongest. hari samples are tricky, too, he says. you need to get 50 strands, 1.5 inches in length cut one-quarter-inch from the scalp.

The most reliable home drug-testing kits have been approved by the FDA and offer confirmation of the results by a medical laboratory. The industry's best seller, Phamatech's $29.99 At Home™ multi panel, which tests for five types of drugs, includes a special mailer for people to send the results to the company's lab in San Diego.

Having the Doctor Do It

Given all the potential pitfalls in home testing, Harris B. Stratyner, clinical director of addiction at Mount Siani Medical Center in new York, recommends asking a pediatrician to perform a drug test instead of taking on the delicate matter yourself. Dr. Stratyner fears that many parents aren't equipped to deal with a positive result. A pediatrician, however, can work with the family and refer them to a specialist. Testing at home is "a tricky business," he warns. "It can affect the relationship between the child and parent."