Chemical hair straightening shown to significantly reduce concentrations of drugs in hair tests

[Scarecrow]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25298521?dopt=Abstract

This popped up in my RSS feed, thought I'd share it. Interesting research! For purely academic reasons, of course.

[Kykeion]

Interesting. Curious to read the actual article. I find it interesting that "This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US." is stated in the abstract, yet you sill have to pay for a journal subscription to access it.

[Anodyne]

I'm a bit confused that anyone would even doubt that in the first place. The process involves coating hair in a paste of sodium hydroxide or other highly alkaline (pH10-14) chemicals^*. Bleaching the hair would remove even more traces. Apparently so can perming, dyeing, and repeated washing with shampoo or salt water (ref).

Drug-testing companies are aware of these dodges - I've never encountered hair testing in Australia, but I'm guessing it will be like urine testing - if they suspect the sample has been tampered with or attempts made to destroy evidence (eg. if the urine sample you hand them is very dilute or not at body-temperature), then they'll just work out another way to test you. So I suspect if you mess with the hair on your head (in an obvious way, at least), then they would just take a blood sample, fingernail cutting, or hair from elsewhere on your body.

After reading the paper, it looks like the coke metabolites were the ones most affected by this treatment (roughly 5-25% remained afterwards, depending which metabolite they looked at). THC levels were reduced by about a third.