Although we pride ourselves on catching almost all cheaters, sometimes they do get away with it, or at least they think they do.

How do we know that? If a specimen goes to the lab, they do what’s called validity testing before they test the specimen for drugs.

Validity testing is to determine if the specimen the lab receives meets certain criteria. They test for: PH, creatinine, and specific gravity. If a specimen is out-of-range based on strict criteria that has been established over years of testing, the lab goes no further in the testing process and releases the specimen as either adulterated (something was added to the urine) or substituted (not consistent with human urine).

Why do labs do validity testing? Because there’s so much cheating, they added this additional testing years ago to thwart cheaters.

Once we receive these adulterated or substituted results from the lab, we know that the donor cheated. We always review and discuss these cases (although very rare) to try and determine where we failed and to learn from it.

We recently had a donor’s test come back from the lab as substituted, so we then released it as a refusal to test because the donor “refused” to give the collector a “valid” specimen.

The employer in this case allowed the donor to retest (this was not a Federal-DOT test, which prohibits re-testing) if he paid for the test himself. Additionally, the employer wanted the 2nd test performed under direct observation procedures. The donor came in and paid for the test, then we informed him it was to be observed. He left the clinic proclaiming, “I will not allow another dude to look at my stuff! No job is worth that!”

I guess he didn’t get away with it after all.

We don’t catch them all at First Choice, but we certainly use all the tools at our disposal to get our customers what they need: accurate results quickly.