Ask the experts: Urine – the ‘gold standard’ of drug testing

Question: Why is urine testing the most frequently used method for drug testing?

Businesses that drug test their applicants and employees do so to minimize their exposure to the risks of employee drug use. While all drug test specimen types – urine, oral fluid and hair – have their advantages, urine drug testing is by far the most flexible and customizable. With hundreds of different combinations of detectable drugs, test codes and cutoff levels, there’s a urine testing panel for almost any reason for testing. Other advantages of urine drug testing include:

• The ability to detect recent drug use
• Fast, consistent result turnaround times from the laboratory
• It’s a proven methodology – with millions of tests performed each year
• Drug test collections are performed  at almost every collection site
• It is the only specimen type approved for U.S. Department of Transportation testing, which has helped to evangelize its status as the tried and true ‘gold standard’ of workplace drug testing.

For more information about drug testing, visit our website.