Governments, companies and organizations worldwide have found a new, popular form of “quality control,” although some might call it class management. And just what is that quality control, you ask? Drug testing. Yes, you read that right–drug testing. Drug testing is used to literally strain out those people who are not considered appropriate for specific job positions, like law enforcement. It is also used as a method to find those who need to go through rehabilitation-all because of the drug use in employees.

Drug testing can be accomplished through several different methods. How sensitive a test, or rather, the type of test that you end up taking, is reliant on exactly what kind of job you are going for or even in at the time. Urine tests, the lowest-level test of them all, only tell if any drugs have been used while the drug remains in your body. So, if the drug only lasts in your body for eight hours, and you take the urine test in nine hours, that drug you are worried about won’t show up. Urine tests tend to be used for entry or low-level jobs. If the drugs that are being tested for have a short enough half-life, those drugs can be missed in the urine test. Test cards are used to immediately check urine tests.

Blood sample drug testing is what is typically used by law enforcement agencies of all types, due to the fact that their sensitivity is so extremely high-and they will show drug usage that the urine samples just simply will not. Until the very last vestige of a drug runs through someone’s body, this makes the perfect choice for random drug tests. On the down side though, blood tests take longer to finish in the lab, and are more costly.

Insurance agencies prefer to use saliva tests, simply due to the fact that they can be completed whenever the insurance agent, and the other person meet up. Just like the blood test, saliva tests require some time in the lab to complete, and are also more costly than the urine test.