Source: New York Times (NY) Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Copyright: 1998 The New York Times Company Pubdate: 17 Nov 1998 Section: Health & Fitness, Page F7 Author: Sheryl Gay Stolberg RANDOM DRUG TESTING COMES HOME On a weekday afternoon in 1992, Sunny Cloud, an insurance saleswoman and single mother in Marietta, Ga., dropped by her home unexpectedly and found her 16-year-old son, Ron, smoking marijuana. Stunned, Ms. Cloud hustled the boy off to the nearest hospital emergency room, where she asked doctors to screen his urine. "I was scared," she said recently, "and I didn't know what else to do." The procedure was expensive, and embarrassing. So Ms. Cloud, still suspicious of her son, decided to do her own drug tests, sending him into the family bathroom in boxer shorts with instructions to come out with a cup full of urine that she could ship to a local laboratory for analysis. That is how Ms. Cloud began a cottage industry: the home drug testing business. As more teen-agers experiment with illicit drugs, a small but growing roster of companies, including Parents Alert, founded by Ms. Cloud in 1994, are marketing drug testing kits to parents. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the latest of these kits, the QuickScreen at Home Drug Test made by Phamatech, a San Diego manufacturer of diagnostic tests. The company bills its product as the first to give parents a result at home. Phamatech says that when the kit hits drug stores in December, screening for marijuana, cocaine, LSD or heroin will be as simple as taking a home pregnancy test. But while advocates of the kits describe them as lifelines for parents struggling to keep their teen-agers away from illicit drugs, critics warn that the tests will turn parents into detectives, undermining the fragile trust essential in guiding children through the tumultuous teen-age years. "If parents want the illusion of control, then I think they should scamper out and buy this kit and use it," said Dr. Daniel H. Gottlieb, a family therapist in suburban Philadelphia and an adviser to the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "On the other hand, if they want a good relationship with their child, they need to talk to their child to find out what is going on in that child's life." Teen-age use of illicit drugs has risen steadily over the past six years, according to Monitoring the Future, a study by the University of Michigan that has examined drug abuse among high school seniors every year since 1975. Among the graduating class of 1992, 27.1 percent had used an illegal drug in the year before the survey; by last year, the figure had jumped to 42.4 percent. In 1997, Nearly half of 12th graders had tried marijuana by the time they graduated; 8.7 percent had tried cocaine; 13.6 percent had tried LSD and 2.1 percent had tried heroin. But those figures, while alarming, do not mean that drug dependency is rampant among teen-agers. Dr. David T. Feinberg, a child psychiatrist and expert in addiction at the University of California at Los Angeles, estimates that 5 percent of American teen-agers are addicted to drugs. Parents, he said, need to be able to tell dependency from the "normal experimentation," that is part of the rite of passage to adulthood, a distinction a drug test cannot make. "Parents should not be performing medical tests on their kids," Feinberg said. Nor, he added, should pediatricians. "The way to determine if a kid has a drug problem is the way to determine if a kid has any problem, first by taking a history, then a physical," Feinberg said. Moreover, Feinberg says, the tests do not always tell the truth. Eating a poppy seed bagel can render a urine test positive; so, too, can taking certain over-the-counter cold remedies. The new test marketed by Phamatech cautions parents that while a negative result is proof that a child is not using drugs, a positive result is not conclusive and must be confirmed by a laboratory. "Some people have said, 'Don't you think this is like Big Brother watching you?"' asked Carl Mongiovi, Phamatech's director of operations and regulatory affairs. "Neither myself nor my company is interested in getting into the family unit, telling people how to do things. But parents seem to need some help." Mongiovi and other proponents of the tests, including officials at the National Parents' Resource In Drug Education, a nonprofit group based in Atlanta, say talking with young people about drugs is hardly as easy as Feinberg and others suggest. They argue that when parents have suspicions that a child is using drugs, testing may be a good way -- in some cases, the only way -- to start a truthful dialogue. "Many parents that I have talked to feel that it is hard for them to discuss this with their adolescents," said Dr. Herbert Kleber, medical director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. "These tests can help deal with that issue, if they are used as part of the communication between parent and child. If they are used as a club, they are going to cause harm." The kits come in various forms. Ms. Cloud's version, the Parents Alert Home Drug Test Service, sells for $44.95 and includes a urine collection bottle, a prepaid courier package to send to the lab and the toll-free number of a drug counselor. She says the counseling is essential. "A drug test is just a tool," she said. "It gives you information. What most people don't know is what to do with the information." Phamatech's test is designed to eliminate the laboratory, as much as possible. The company says its kit, which will cost between $25 and $35, will tell parents in about 10 minutes if their children are free of drugs. It is already used by employers. For those who do not like the idea of urine tests, there is an at-home hair analysis kit, marketed by the Psychemedics Corp., a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Mass. Psychemedics bills the product as "designed for parents concerned about drug abuse." The hair test costs $59.95, and has the advantage of surprise: A parent can take a snip of hair while a child is sleeping. It is difficult to determine how many of these kits are sold each year; most of the companies involved will not divulge sales figures. But Ken Adams, the owner of Parents Home Drug Testing, a company that is doing a brisk business selling unlicensed tests over the Internet, says he sells 1,000 kits a month. Dr. Bruce Burlington, director of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the FDA, said several companies have requested approval for tests similar to Phamatech's. Although Adams says his company operates in a "gray area," Bruce Burlington of the FDA says the food and drug agency considers the sale of unlicensed tests illegal. "We are in the process right now of weighing what actions we should take," he said. The companies marketing these tests advocate that parents set up a "family drug policy." "Start when they are 11 or 12," Adams suggested. "Say that part of the family drug policy is that there is going to be random drug testing. That doesn't mean I don't love you and I don't trust you. It means that this thing is too serious to take a chance." Adams and Ms. Cloud both argue that the at-home tests can give adolescents an easy out -- "a good excuse to say no to peer pressure," in Ms. Cloud's words. Her son, Ron, now a 22-year-old junior at the University of Georgia, agrees. He said he smoked his first marijuana cigarette in the eighth grade, and by 10th grade he was smoking marijuana and taking LSD regularly. "His grades slipped," Ms. Cloud said. "He started getting belligerent." Cloud said that he stopped using drugs several years ago, after some "major spiritual revelations" that began four years ago, when he was a senior in high school. He said he had attended a concert by the heavy metal group Nine Inch Nails, had taken LSD and "was pretty far out there." "I felt like I was going into the depths of hell," he said. After the concert, he went home and woke up his mother. "I told her I was sorry for the torture I was putting her through." Subsequently, he said, he turned to religion. Although he initially resented the drug tests his mother forced him to take, Cloud said that they did "play a role in putting me down a good path." "I knew that I couldn't go out and get crazy." - --- Checked-by: Mike Gogulski