Legal Drug Testing

Our drug testing panel

AlphaBiolabs is able to test for the widest range of drugs and metabolites, including non-standard ones. Using a variety of testing methods, both short-term and historic, drug use can be established. Your account manager will be able to advise you on which test is right for your case, saving you time and money.

Below is a list of the main drugs we can test for:

* These drugs are not in our standard panel. However, we can arrange hair drug testing for them and other less common drugs for an additional fee.

Accredited legal drug testing

AlphaBiolabs specialises in legal drug testing. We have worked with solicitors and local authorities for 15 years to build a service designed for their needs.

We go to great lengths to ensure that our legal drug testing processes are the best available, which is why you can be sure if you take a legal drug test with AlphaBiolabs you will get the fastest, most accurate drug testing available.

Our testing laboratory is accredited by UKAS (No. 2773), to the quality technical standard of ISO 17025, and we are also certified to ISO 9001.

Oral fluid drug testing

Oral fluid testing can determine whether someone is misusing drugs by taking a sample of their saliva and analysing it for particular substances. This is a ‘narrow window’ form of testing as its period of detection is up to 48 hours (although this can depend on the particular substance taken).

An immediate negative result may mean that no further action needs to be taken. A non-negative result may need to undergo confirmation testing from the laboratory to determine exactly what substance was taken and in what quantities.

Hair drug testing

Hair drug testing can determine whether drugs have been abused over a prolonged period of time.

An average person’s head hair grows at a rate of approximately 1 cm per month. Following consumption of a drug and its passage into the bloodstream, a proportion of the drug’s metabolites will enter the hair follicle.

The head hair sample is collected and cut according to the specific requirements. An overview drugs of abuse test, for example to cover a period of 3 months, may show positive for the whole 3-month period even if your client has abused drugs occasionally. This can give the impression that the sample donor had been abusing drugs for the whole period analysed.

To gain a clearer picture of how long the client has been using a drug, we recommend that the hair is segmented, and each segment analysed separately for the presence of drugs. This allows us to analyse the hair sample on a month-by-month basis to indicate over which months the sample donor was taking the drug, rather than providing a general overview of the entire period.

We can perform drug tests using either head or body hair samples. Body or beard hair can only be used to provide up to a 12-month overview of drug use.

Hair testing permits drug use to be determined over a period of months. It can also show whether your client has refrained from taking drugs, and if they have started taking drugs again.

The table below shows an example of hair analyses regularly performed at our laboratory:

Hair drug testing gives a detailed history of drug use from 2 weeks after ingestion, up to approximately a 12-month period.

Sample collection network

We have a network of trained sample collectors available to collect samples from an address of your choice.

If you require a legal drug test, please call 0140 29466 for our latest offers.