More Than a Hair Off.

• Author: KEAN, LESLIE
• Position: Ethnic bias in hair drug testing

If you're not white, beware the new drug tests

Althea Jones, an African-American mother of two, always wanted to go to police school. "It was my lifelong dream to be a police officer, ever since I was a little girl," she says. When she applied for admission to the Chicago Police Academy, it requested a sample of her hair, which it sent to Psychemedics, the largest hair-testing company in the country. The results came back positive for drug use.

"I was shocked. I couldn't believe it," says Jones. "I don't even smoke or drink. I was heartbroken by this." She was denied admission to the academy and is now a criminal justice major at Chicago State University.

Adrian McClure, an African-American woman, was also keen on a career with the Chicago police department. When she was a senior in college in 1997, she submitted a hair sample to the academy, which sent it to the Psychemedics Corporation. Her test came back positive, too. She says she tried to explain that it was an error and requested a new test, but was rebuffed. "Everybody knows I don't use drugs," McClure says. "This thing has a hold of me. They have shattered me."

Last August, Althea Jones and Adrian McClure, along with six other Chicago African-Americans who say they received erroneous hair test results when applying for the Police Academy, filed complaints of racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The complaints are currently under investigation, and the group is considering suing both the city of Chicago and Psychemedics.

Jones and McClure are just two of many who have lost out as a result of hair testing. Numerous scientific studies have shown hair testing to be inaccurate and unreliable. And the procedure appears to give false positives disproportionately to African-Americans. Nevertheless, use of hair tests is expanding nationwide. Psychemedics reports that business is booming. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm more than doubled sales of its hair test between 1993 and 1997, and in 1997 The Boston Globe named Psychemedics one of the "Top Fifty Growth Companies" of Massachusetts. "The total annual market for drug testing in the United States has been estimated at between $500 and $600 million, and is growing fast," says Psychemedics CEO Raymond C. Kubacki Jr.

Psychemedics services 1,400 businesses that use hair testing on their employees and job applicants. These include General Motors, Anheuser Busch, BMW, Rubbermaid, and Steelcase Corporation. The company is also conducting hair tests for forty to fifty schools, five Federal Reserve banks, and the police departments of New York City, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco.

Whites and blacks have complained about the tests.

Three Police Academy members were given hair tests in New York City as part of their application to the police department. The three Caucasian men claim that they did not take drugs and that the test was flawed. Two of the men had clean urine tests within months prior to the New York police department test. To bolster their assertions, these two men sent hair samples off for a second test to Laboratory Corporation of America and Metropolitan Drug Screening. According to Peter Coddington, an attorney retained by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to represent the men, the tests from the other labs produced opposite results. "They were clean," he said.

"It is quite clear that the police...