News & Updates

For many years, the field of drug addiction treatment was considered by most to be a poor financial investment, but now with the rise of opioid addiction in the United States, it has turned into a gold mine as treatment providers have discovered that insurance companies will pay out big dollars in the relatively unregulated market.

Over the past several years, a number of high-profile lawsuits have been filed in the United States by health insurance agencies against drug labs and treatment centers who administered unnecessarily high frequency and excessively expensive panels of drug screenings. Although the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) recommends regular drug screenings as a way to complement treatment and discourage relapse, many treatment centers have found ways to exploit insurers by administering excessive lab tests. In these cases, health insurance providers footed the bill for millions of dollars’ worth of testing that was not deemed “medically necessary.”

This happens in a variety of ways, including:

• Urine is tested in the treatment center initially using cheap, disposable kits and then sent to the lab for sophisticated tests, even if no evidence of drug use was found.
• Testing is administered for multiple drugs that the client has never expressed interest in using.
• Testing continues to occur on a daily basis, even after the client has a solid period of sobriety.

Additionally, a number of drug labs have been accused of offering kickbacks to treatment facilities in exchange for increased frequency of testing. It got to the point that in 2014 the US Department of Health and Human Services issued a Special Fraud Alert warning providers against accepting payments and referrals from drug testing laboratories.

Here at SBH Laboratories, we pride ourselves on maintaining the highest ethical standards in the industry, with facilities certified by the Commission of Office Laboratory Accreditation (COLA), the premier independent clinical accreditor, to meet stringent Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) regulations.

Kratom (Mitragynine), a powder made from a tropical tree related to coffee, has for thousands of years been used in traditional Southeast Asian medicine as a mild pain releaver. Today it is sold in head shops and tobacco stores around the United States as a legal and “natural” high, and billed as a safe alternative to harder opiates.

Over the past several years however, there has been growing conern amongst experts about it’s psychoactive properties and and potential for abuse. While not restricted under the Controlled Substances Act, it was recently listed by the DEA as one of it’s Drugs and Chemicals of Concern. Between 2010 and 2015, 660 calls were placed to Poison Control Centers citing Kratom exposure, with some extreme cases involving psychosis, seizures and hallucinations.

One of the factors driving it’s popularity in the United States is that Kratom doesn’t show up in most over-the-counter drug tests, making it an appealing alternative for people in treatment for harder substance abuse. Although several manufacturers offer kits that test specifically for Kratom, these are specific tests not routinely administered by drug and alcohol treatment centers. Although nowhere near as dangerous the drugs driving the recent opioid epidemic in America, Kratom has the potential to adversly affect those seeking help recovering from harder substance abuse. Drug testing laboratories across the states are developing a suite of tools to detect for Kratom as well as other emerging drugs.

As rates of addiction have skyrocketed across the United States over the past decade, the blossoming field of addiction treatment has given rise to a number of side industries, few of which have been more lucrative than drug testing. Treatment centers across the nation now frequently require patients to submit to regular drug screenings as a requirement for continuing care, and drug testing laboratories have become a multi-billion dollar industry, which, until recently, has gone largely unregulated. Historically, how these drug screenings are implemented has varied widely between treatment centers, and frequent false negatives and positives have had severe impacts on the lives of individuals seeking help for drug addiction.

However, guidelines published in the Journal of Addiction Medicine attempt to set national standards for clinical drug testing. The guidelines lay out acceptable frequency for drug testing, define distinction between testing as a complement to treatment as opposed to a relapse deterrent, and list a number of common false positives that frequently occur in drug tests, such as poppy seeds testing positive for morphine. They stress that drug testing should be used as a therapeutic tool, not as a gatekeeper for inpatient treatment or in a way that pits patients against care providers.

With standardized knowledge regarding the limitations and acceptable use of drug testing in treatment, care providers are now better positioned to work with labs to use screenings in a way that supports patients during treatment and reduces unnecessary cost overhead. The entire set of guidelines is freely available and can be accessed via the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s website: https://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/public-policy-statements/drug-testing-a-white-paper-by-asam.pdf