Paul Powles, senior toxicology case manager at Environmental Scientifics Group, says hair toxicology can actually provide a time line of drug or alcohol abuse, in addition to being a quick and easy method of obtaining a sample.<\/p>\n
\u201cHair should be taken from a non-obvious place, but some employees may object to the removal, so urine and saliva testing can provide an alternative method,\u201d says Mr Powles, adding that such tests are relatively inexpensive and can be administered by staff with no medical background.<\/p>\n
Used as a pre-employment screening process, they help ensure that staff are not taken on with a history of illicit drug use. Furthermore, if an employee subsequently develops a drug or alcohol problem, the test offers an easy way to help them demonstrate that they have overcome it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t anticipate port unions having many objections,\u201d says Mr Powles. \u201cA robust drug and alcohol policy should be based around the health and safety of employees – as well as the general public they may come in contact with – and be proportionate to the level of risk associated with abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n
While urine and oral fluid tests could be manipulated by candidates who are aware that they will form part of the assessment process \u2013 by not drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs for a time period before the tests are administered \u2013 it is more difficult to do this with hair testing as the evidence remains within the hair for an extended period of time, providing a longer term picture of potential use.<\/p>\n
If a sample of hair is taken from the head, it is able to provide a chronological history of drug use, as it grows at an accepted rate of 1 cm per month. If head hair is not available, testing can still be undertaken on samples from other parts of the body, such as underarm, chest, leg or pubic hair, however a time line of drug use cannot be drawn up as this hair does not grow at a constant rate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oral and urine testing are the normal methods associated with drugs and alcohol screening, but there are alternative methods of testing that give even more interesting results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-3831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concessions-investments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3831"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=3831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}