ABSTRACT
The analysis of drugs of abuse in human hair, first reported in 1978, is increasingly being recognized as a useful test to complement urine and blood analysis. The fact that hair analysis is difficult to evade, and its ability to provide long-term histories of drug use appear to be the main reasons for its popularity for nonclinical applications. The methods for different types of contamination experiments are also described. The residual amounts of drugs which were found in the dissolved hair were once again insignificant in relation to the total initial contamination. Wash procedures were developed on the basis of these initial contamination experiments. With hair analysis, the normally occurring decontamination processes are augmented by vigorously applied wash procedures, wash kinetic analyses, and measurement of metabolites. One possible approach for avoiding the problems of evidentiary false positives is for urinalysis to raise its cutoff levels.
