Objective information about an individual’s recent drug habits can be provided by drug testing. A lead role has been taken by NIDA in developing the scientific basis of drug testing. Saliva Drug test has become popular today. Some general issues were addressed by Assistant Secretary for Legislation, department of Health and Human Services such as:
An active research was done on the utility of saliva as a biological material for drug testing. There are many advantages and some disadvantages when compared to the urine test. Easily accessible for collection and cannot be objected. These are the major advantages of saliva-Drug test when compared to urine test. It can detect the presence of parent drug in higher abundance than metabolites, and high correlation between the concentration of drug. It can detect the amount of cocaine and correlates it with the physiological findings of cocaine like heart rate and blood pressure.
Not only advantages, but there are some disadvantages also, like risk of contamination of saliva by the drug when orally used, smoked and intransal routes. The correlation between saliva and blood drug concentrations can be altered by contamination, so spoiling the useful pharmacokinetic relationships.
Short time for detectability of drugs is one of the disadvantages of saliva-Drug test because of this it cannot detect the historical drug use, but this test is useful to detect the recent drug use. Generally, drugs disappear from saliva and blood from 12 to 24 hours after consumption.
However, this test is useful to detect the recent drug use in drivers, employees to conduct the safety sensitive activities.