Alcohol Abuse Advice

Hair Alcohol Testing for Senior Prom, not Your Grandma?s Prom Night

It’s definitely not like it use to be when kids would spike the punch bowl. Those times are over. For a safe prom night, high schools all over the country are enforcing breathalyzer tests when students get to the door.

 

Because of the deterrent, school officials feel that it gives the students one more reason to say no to alcohol that night. Parents and teachers are in strong support of the tests because no one wants to find out on Monday that someone was killed in a drunk driving accident.

 

The breathalyzers may prevent students from drinking at the prom night but what about students who may have a real problem with drinking alcohol? For problem users, school officials and counselors are using a revolutionary test called hair alcohol testing. The hair alcohol test would be a test that is only given periodically instead of daily or weekly.

 

With as much as an inch and a half of hair cut from the scalp of a student, a hair alcohol testing laboratory can find out what a person’s approximated consumption of alcohol has been up to a 30 day history and if the hair sample is longer, as much as a year of alcohol consumption can be tested. Using sensitive equipment, a small sample of hair can reveal everything a person has consumed from vitamins, drugs and now even alcohol.

 

The rate that alcohol leaves the body in hours and minutes makes it extremely difficult to judge how much a person has consumed and how long ago it was that the person consumed it. What else is difficult to uncover is the history someone has of alcohol abuse. A series of assessments called FAEE, fatty acid ethyl esters and EtG alcohol testing are done to measure the amount of FAEE and EtG markers that are revealed in the tests. The more alcohol a person has consumed, the more markers will be present on a test. Since one test at the beginning of the school year could reveal problem drinkers, those students could be treated instead of punished and then use the same hair alcohol test to measure progress.

 

Hair alcohol testing is really the least intrusive test you can give to students without causing the need for extra attention to an already sensitive topic. Plus, unlike urine alcohol testing, it can’t be tampered with. Bleach, hair dye or other external contaminants will not affect the outcome of the test. Only shaving one’s head will affect the results of the test as there would not be any evidence which to test.

Testing students as they attend prom is definitely an intrusive and tacky means to test students in their gorgeous gowns and tuxes but with hair alcohol testing, merely showing their student ID would be perfectly acceptable and just like attending prom, 50 years back.

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