When Kirt Haneberg started running a new kind of drug screening test on construction workers he deals with, he got a big surprise.



The lab wasn't finding drugs in the urine. It wasn't finding urine in the samples, either.





Scores of prospective workers were filling collection cups with synthetic urine they bought to slip past employer drug screens. In the first six months of testing — from January through June 2009 — 100 tests showed fake urine out of roughly 1,900 total samples.

“Of the people who were retested within 24 hours, 98 to 99 percent of them came back positive” for drugs, said Haneberg, who manages the Construction Industry Drug-Free Workplace Program. That program gives pre-employment, random and post-accident drug tests to carpenters, bricklayers and masons in Oregon and southwest Washington, offering education and treatment to those who fail a test.

Some workers were surprised to finally get caught yellow-handed. “There are many scenarios where it was obvious people were getting away with it for years,” he said. “And now they’re not.”

The results gave Haneberg a peek at the strange, seamy market for drug-free urine, a product available in an obscene array of forms, from the dried urine ex-University of Oregon football player

once carried to a mail-order solution called

.

“

has its own brand,” said Linda Pumpelly, whose

stocks two brands, modestly popular with customers.

“Synthetic urine is sold for different things. Some of them are kinky. Some of them are testing,” Pumpelly said. “I have people who come back and get it every month. I have people who buy it by the dozen – those are mostly people who live in some small town” that lacks a local purveyor.

Many kits are bought by people who face urine tests and lack the time to detoxify naturally. Users generally smuggle a synthetic sample into a testing center in a flask hidden in their underwear, then warm it and surreptitiously fill a sample cup.

Passing fake water turns out to be surprisingly common. At

in Portland, which screens hundreds of urine specimens for employers each month, more than 1 percent of the samples are synthetic. That’s down from about 2.5 percent when the lab started screening for synthetic urine two years ago, said David Roberts, manager of toxicology for Legacy Laboratory Services.

Justice labs are also flooded with fake urine. At Multnomah County’s

, which works with offenders out of compliance with probation and parole requirements, 20 to 30 percent of urine samples “show evidence of tampering,” said Kim Bernard, communications manager for the county

. The tampering includes people who dilute their own urine and tricksters who turn in a range of substitutes.

“For example,” she said, “someone tried to pass off a sample of

as their own.”

Artificial urine also flows through the sports world, where some athletes use it to beat doping tests. In one of the most notorious cases, UO alum and then-Minnesota Vikings running back Smith was stopped in the Minneapolis airport in 2005 with vials of dried urine in his luggage next to a prosthetic urine-delivery device called The Original

. The NFL

for a year.

Haneberg said the number of artificial urine samples submitted by construction

workers fell as word of Legacy’s tests spread. His program has found just 67 synthetic samples in the past year, a third the rate of the first six months. He hopes that change has averted some construction accidents.

“This isn’t about catching people. This is about making the workplace safe,” he said. “When you have a good lab, you have good people supporting you and your intentions are pure, drug testing is a beautiful thing.”

Other employers have similar stories, Roberts said: One child care provider decided not to hire a man whose sample was found to hold synthetic urine. “The next day, they saw in the newspaper that person had been arrested for child abuse and selling drugs,” he said.

The dopers of the world aren’t just lounging on futons while labs bust their bad specimens. The makers of artificial urine keep developing more realistic products, so labs must find new tests to spot the fakes.

“Most people can actually do this,” Roberts said. “If I hand you two cups, one is urine and one is water with yellow dye, almost anyone can tell the cup with yellow dye.”

But suspecting a fake and scientifically showing it are two different things. That’s where the expertise of lab scientists comes in. Roberts said urine “is a very complex material,” with hundreds of bodily waste products that labs can test for.

One of those products,

, is commonly used to tell pure urine from diluted or fake samples. Companies that make fake urine got wise to this test years ago, so today’s synthetics usually include creatinine along with a coloring dye and, sometimes, some salts.

Labs have moved on to test for other chemicals you’d expect to find in real human urine, as well as smelling specimens and shaking them to see if they foam naturally. Bernard said the county is “continually working to update our drug testing procedures so we can stay ahead of the clients who would try to circumvent the process.”

Roberts expects his lab will have to evolve, as well.

“At some point, we’ll revise our testing, if someone figures out what we’re doing,” Roberts said. “Sometimes this is sort of a cat-and-mouse game.”

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