ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the practical application of drug testing in field studies of drug abuse as conducted by the first author over the past decade. Issues addressed are the rationale for drug testing and the choice of test(s), techniques and difficulties of implementing drug testing in various field situations, interpretation of drug test results, and the contributions of drug testing vs. self-reports to arriving at study conclusions. The experiences indicate that biological testing for drugs of abuse can make a significant contribution to improve behavioral drug-abuse research. Biological testing is far from perfect. More needs to be learned about both hair analysis and saliva analysis including such issues as appropriate cutoff concentrations, conditions influencing sensitivity and specificity, dose/assay relationships and the interpretation of quantitative results, and the effects of external contamination, possible deposition by sweat, cosmetic treatments, and hair pigmentation and structure on analytical results.
