Types of Drug Addiction Tests

Drug addiction is a dangerous stage at which, it’s very difficult for an addict to come out of these drugs.  It leads to many serious problems not only for the addicts, but also their family members. The sooner it is diagnosed better are the chances to get rid off this problem. Now days there are various drug addiction tests available, making it convenient for anyone to easily find out whether they are suffering from drug addiction.

Basically, there are five kinds of drug addiction tests that are in use off late.      They involve testing the Urine, blood, saliva, sweat and hair of the addicts. These laboratory tests are accurate and have the ability to reveal all kinds of drugs such as cocaine, heroin, alcohol, marijuana, opium, morphine etc. More extensive and detailed tests could also   detect other serious drugs like methadone, vicodin, Librium etc. There is also another type of test, which is known as  “self test”, where some questions are present and the person has to answer them sincerely. The score of the test tells whether the person is a drug addict or not and if he is a drug addict, then what is his level of addiction.

Urine test is an inexpensive drug addiction test, hence extensively used by most of the employers; legal enforcements and also the house hold people. There are also some home based urine test kits available for individuals to take the test on their own, but the results may not be accurate. Most of the urine tests have the ability to detect the drug usage within the past week or up to 30 days later, but not beyond that.

Saliva tests are also reasonably priced, but they are only able to detect the drug usage within few hours. Although there are no cutoff concentrations for the confirmation of the drug usage and nationally accepted standards, this test is also commonly used.. Hair tests are the next inexpensive tests and are best suitable to detect the usage of drugs for longer periods – where they beat the urine tests. The only disadvantage with these kinds of tests is that there is a possibility of it giving false result for the people who are present in a room where there was a marijuana smoke.

Sweat tests are uncommon and rarely used as there is no guarantee that they give accurate results as such tests heavily rely s on the contamination of the skin surface. Blood tests are the most expensive and accurate of all drug addiction tests.

In United States, it is a rule that middle and high schools should conduct such drug addiction tests randomly to detect and prevent the spread of drug addiction in students.  However, the more number of tests that are getting invented and used, the more number of ways the teens and students are discovering to escape from them.