I am 100% drug free but have a question regarding hair testing. I was wondering whats up with the the Chevron “Non-DOT” hair testing along w/ a DOT urine test. If a applicant passes the urine test but fails the hair test will it get reported to the USCG? I’m worried since lots of friends/family around me smoke pot (I am on a random consortium and pass every UA).
Dude, if you wash your hair before the test, you are ok. But if you smoke a joint a few weeks ago you better stay away from that nurse.
I don’t believe non DOT tests are reported to the USCG. That’s just for in house decisions.
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IIRC, by law the USCG can only consider results from a DOT 5 panel drug test. Chevron can fire you or refuse to let you crew on a boat contracted to them but the USCG shouldn’t care.
The USCG was working on adopting the Hair Follicle Test. I do not know that status of that.
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Good thing you replied then!!
Merry Christmas to you, and especially to the poor souls on your unhappy ship at MSC.
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I celebrate Kwanzaa and don’t work for MSC but thank you!!
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How does hair follicle testing affect people if they consume weed in a place it is legal.
Someone could have legally consumed weed months ago and it be totally out their system but it would still show up in a hair follicle test.
Consuming weed is never legal under federal law.
Admitting, or having it found out, that one has ever used weed is a bar to holding an MMC from the USCG.
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Not an absolute bar, but the burden will be on the applicant to show they should be given an MMC, and they will need to provide additional information to establish that. See 46 CFR 10.211(l).
A few years ago, a ferry under contract to the Federal government to transport people and vehicles to Cape Lookout National Seashore ran aground. When the USCG investigated, it was discovered one of the crew was smoking pot so the company lost their contract and had to shut down the ferry service. In this case, someone lost their job and their employer lost their business. Not judging smoking pot one way or the other but sometimes you have to decide whether it's "about you" or the people you are responsible to.
Hair follicle testing for pot is asinine. It just shows some person smoked pot up to 90 days in the past. Who cares? Any company that requires that test must be something akin to the Taliban. Do they test their executives for trace amounts of alcohol every morning? I have had a lot of experience with crew change members coming on going thru alcohol withdrawal. Were they drunk? No, but they were useless for about a week.
Any company that does hair follicle testing in this day is trying to impose their hypocritical morals on their workers. I’d steer clear of them.
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You shouldn’t be worried at all, if you are 100% drug free. Go give them those 120 strands of hair. Enjoy working for Chevron and those at Jack/St. Malo crew…
Agreed, but only state side imo. I’ve seen a company use hair follicle testing while international & the HR/Safety Dept people flew back to the states with the samples. We guessed they went with hair because they wanted to use a US lab but didn’t want the hassle of flying back US with a case of body fluids. Some countries have shitty everything including laboratories, chain of custody security & shipping things in a timely manner. But I also heard of US companies using hair follicle tests to get as many people off the payroll as possible during the crash in '15. If you’re in the US & taking a hair follicle test then you’re probably working for cutthroat company &/or your sector of the maritime trade is about to get a lot worse.
My understanding is that hair follicle testing has been done on very old hair of long dead celebrities.
I’m told that hair follicles keep a lifetime record of drug use.
If you snorted a little coke in the 70’s, your hair supposedly can rat you out.
This isn’t something that I’ll ever need to worry about.
A safety guy taking a hair follicle sample from me told me 90 days, maybe up to 6 months if you were using some drugs really hard & if your hair grows real slow. It was a follow up, post accident test & it didn’t bother me any. For international locals, hair follicle makes sense to me. We lost a cook on that go around but he wasn’t involved in the event in any way. From my understanding, I think they can only test a few cm from the root/skin because grease, the sun, cleaners, dyes, pollution, time etc. deteriorates hair the older it gets.
https://www.drugs.com/lifestyle/far-back-hair-follicle-test-detect-drugs-3562480/
Things are in flux with significant changes in the pipeline over the next 24 months. IIRC DOT published an intent to switch from urine to saliva testing in the immediate future. Dunno what that means beyond that longstanding standards and practices are likely to change.
A few medical thoughts on “hair follicle” testing:
- As a rule of thumb, longevity of metabolites (and thus detectability) is in the order: blood (hours/days) < urine (days) < hair (weeks/months). However, some substances have very short-lived metabolites that do not enter hairs in detectable quantities. Thus, the sampling methods may complement each other in toxicology and forensics.
- Hair analysis is more costly to perform than urine analysis due to additional preanalytic steps like washing, dissolving etc.
- With “hair”, you have to distinguish [see illustration]:
- The follicle: The part of the hair apparatus beneath/ inside the skin, where growth takes place. May be sampled by extracting (plucking).
- The hair as a dead appendage, the tips of which, depending on length, may be weeks, months or even years old. May be sampled by cutting. Length of 1 cm corresponds to 1-month growth with scalp hair (axillary and pubic growth rates differ). Hair samples should be cut as near to the skin surface as possible.
- “Detectability” greatly depends on the context:
- Academic research laboratory, labour-intensive, experimental analytic setup, extremely sensitive.
- Commercial or institutional routine analysis, partially or fully automated, robust, forensically defendable, generally less sensitive, more conservative detection cutoffs.
- Type of substance to be detected:
- Anorganic compounds, often stable in the very long term, have been detectable by atomic absorption spectroscopy since the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. the long ranging debate on Napoleon’s arsenic poisoning).
- Many organic chemical compounds (most drugs like morphine, methadone, phenobarbital) may be detected by RIA (radio immuno-assay), GC-MS (gas chromatography - mass spectroscopy) or LC-MS (liquid chromatography- mass spectroscopy).
- In a research setting, it is possible to employ segmental analysis along the length of a hair, to a certain extent determining the time course of e.g. heroin addiction and usage activity. Experimentally, even daily sampling of beard hair has been done to construct fine-grained timelines. Due to their long half-life, cannabinoids are not suitable for sectional timeline-analysis.
- Contamination: Drug deposition due to contamination cannot take place in the hair, even if a person is working daily in a controlled drug environment with minimal hygiene and cautions, thus the results of drug testing, if correctly done (samples pre-washed to remove external deposits from smoke and dust), is indicative of ingestion. Furthermore, in hair analysis, the metabolites of drugs are analyzed, which would not exist in external contamination. Metabolites are only produced in the process of organic metabolism within the human body. Metabolites are not present in the illicit drug itself at the time of ingestion/ smoking/ injection. Their existence in the hair sample could not be due to external contamination.
- Detection timelines: Opiates were detected in hair shaft of Victorian poet John Keats. The analysis of the hair was performed 167 years after his death. Scalps were tested positive for benzoylecgonine in the hairs of Peruvian and Chilean mummies of ages of 2000BC to 1500AD. In a study, hair samples from a de-addiction center were collected and analyzed to check the stability of drugs in the hairs. Hair samples were analyzed after 90 days of drug abuse and quantified positively.
- In addition to opioids, cocaine, MDMA, methamphetamine, MDA and designer amphetamines as well as ketamine metabolites are readily detectable.
- Wink-wink: There is no significant effect of shampooing on the drug deposited in the hair. In comparison with the original concentration of drug in the hair, 50–80% of drug concentration reduces dramatically due to cosmetic treatments (bleaching, dyeing). The cosmetic products include strong bases, which damage hair, reduce drug contents, and affect the stability of the drug. Don’t count on it.
[Disclaimer: I am a recreational sailor and MD by profession, but no toxicologist. I have gathered the above information out of curiosity, from a range of medical publications]
(image: wikimedia commons, National Institutes of Health)
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