Hair forensics could yield false positives for cocaine use

Hair analysis has become standard practice for determining whether someone has abused illicit drugs. But some experts have questioned whether current methods to wash away external contaminants from samples might affect test results. Now one team confirms that for cocaine detection, a pretreatment step can cause the drug on the outside of a hair shaft to wash into it and potentially lead to falsely identifying someone as a drug user. Their study appears in ACS' journal Analytical Chemistry.

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