[Barry Neal Cooper]

[ARCHIVE QUESTION]

Originally asked in NGB forums:

[Barry Neal Cooper]

[ARCHIVE ANSWER]

Yes, but not enough to fail a drug test. You'd have to ingest at least 200 milligrams of
cocaine over three months before it could be reliably detected in your body hair. That's
the equivalent of about two lines. It's unclear exactly how much cocaine comes out in the
vaginal secretions of a regular user, but it's likely to be a very small amount.
Samantha Henig offered the ins and outs of hair drug testing. Nina Shen Rastogi looked
into the question of whether hand sanitizers can affect your blood-alcohol level. In 2002,
Dahlia Lithwick reported on the Supreme Court's justification of high-school urine tests.
We do have some equivalent information for men. A 1996 paper suggests that chronic
users might excrete a peak level of 0.01 milligrams of cocaine per gram of semen after
the consumption of a particularly heavy dose. Since a typical ejaculation contains around

two grams of semen, it would take 10,000 precisely timed sexual encounters over that
three-month stretch before a nonuser faced any risk of failing a drug test. (According to
court records, the cop and his girlfriend had sex "three or four times per week.") The
study did point out that "absorption of cocaine from the vagina or rectum is generally
efficient," but such a process would be unlikely to generate positive test results (or
euphoria) in the partners of cocaine-using males.
Bonus Explainer: Court records in the New York case also said that the couple "would
often sweat" during sex. Could skin-to-skin contact have caused a false positive on the
exam? It's possible. Cocaine does get secreted in sweat at levels as high as 100
nanograms per milliliter. In theory, that's more than enough for some sweat-tainted arm
hair to return a false positive. Yet a good lab would have subjected the test hair to a
thorough washing procedure, which would have removed any surface contamination and
leached out any traces of cocaine or its metabolites that managed to penetrate the outer
layers of the hair. In the most stringent testing procedures, the levels of cocaine found in
the wash residue are then subtracted from the levels found in the cleansed hair sample,
which further reduces the chances of external contamination causing a false positive.
Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2215823?from=rss

[Author]

Posts