Whitney Is Right

Hello, Blog. I have neglected you this past week, callously ignoring your cries for attention, shrugging off your emails and intricately crafted macaroni necklaces (painted my favorite shade of apple green), the jewelry, the flowers and singing telegrams. We are like two ships, passing in the night. On different nights.

A customer called in today, demanding to dispute her hair drug test results. She'd tested positive for cocaine and had, on an earlier and separate occasion, also tested positive for cocaine. Aside from there being nothing to dispute, the lab also confirmed - when we called them later - that there was no mistake. There aren't any medications that will give a false positive for cocaine usage, and definitely not in the amounts she was testing at. In sum, she high. She ranted and raved for awhile, then eventually hung up. I wondered if she'd realized suddenly that, wait, she had been using cocaine! And I wondered if that moment of realization was just as jarring and slightly more horrifying as realizing that you are naked in public.


"Crack is whack." --Whitney Houston

I realize things like that all the time about myself. The other day, I found out that I am the president of Burundi. Before that, I found out that I was a unicorn. Now I'm a content writer/phone butler for TestCountry.com and I have two-and-a-half hours left at work.

Here are more sources on cocaine and cocaine addiction:
Focus Adolescent Services
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Cocaine-Effects.com
StreetDrugs.org
CocaineAddiction.com

Stress Balls & Chinese Molasses

My supervisor, currently mumbling incomprehensibly and launching insults at our apathetic NetSuite program, has taken to cutting up foam stress balls and tossing the sad portions into my trash bin. I assume his reasons are stress-relieving in nature, or the ambushes that take place downstairs in the shipping department have strayed into genitally unsafe territory and he is now taking steps to preempt catastrophy. Which I guess is pretty heroic.

Tuesday now and my post-weekend listlessness demands that I find entertainment. In between answering emails and harassing coworkers with my newfound love of Fire Science, I sometimes go over our website to look for things to edit or write about. Through a concentrated effort of blind clicking and voodoo, TestCountry, a fancy teal and blue gem in the gaudy headdress of cyberspace, has given up to me an even fancier gem: the Drug Slang Search Feature. It promises at least five (FIVE!) whole minutes of distraction. Most inventive names so far include:

• Chinese Molasses (opium)
  
• Speed Boat (a marijuana, PCP, and cocaine cocktail)
  
• Idiot Pills (barbiturates)
  
• Georgia Home Boy (GHB)
  
• Chicken Powder (amphetamines)
  and
  
• Chocolate Ecstasy (crack cocaine made brown by adding chocolate milk powder during production)
  

All of which, of course, are part of a complete breakfast.

Six Hours To Go

According to the Blogger homepage, newly updated blogs as of 8:30am include [sic]:

• NEWS FROM DA-HOOD
  
• hermaphrodites
  
• perfectionists
  and
  
• thai massage
  

For years, the greatest regret of my life is going to be not having updated sooner this morning, that I might have been among such noteworthy company. You cannot see me, but I am weeping. Weeping the hot, bitter tears of a fifteen pound chipmunk. Incidentally, the greatest regret of my life after that disappointment has passed is going to be the crippling dehydration from having wept so much.

Another question from our general drug testing inbox today:

I have collected a sample from a boy who has been living at our home. I cut off, with his permission, one of his thin, twisted dreadlocks. Your instructions indicate unraveling the braid first. Can I send this sample and have you unravel it?

In a word, no. In another, NO. It's fortunate that this inquirer got the boy's permission first, so that they were sure to obtain a large enough sample of hair for testing. But the analysis itself is done in a lab facility, not here, and I don't know that lab techs get paid enough to unravel dreadlocks in addition to the actual drug sleuthing.

Weekend plans include entertaining my long-absent best friend from college, as she takes a break from Microbiology and the Midwest, to visit our homeland. I also managed to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest yesterday and am semi-unimpressed with how the movie ended as a vehicle to the third installment, rather than as a contained story all its own. I'm also disappointed that my supervisor has no idea who David Carradine is but remains untroubled by this fact as he sings the commercial jingle for Almond Joy. And I'm disappointed that Mr. T has not yet returned any of my love letters from 15 years ago (and last week). My life is full of hardship.

Water Intoxication: Not As Fun As It Sounds

Summer in San Diego dictates almost automatically that everyday until October will be hot and muggy. The weather forces man and beast to retreat indoors, deserting the roads and parks, making millionaires of the neighborhood ice cream men. Ants and spiders have begun to hang out at my kitchen sink, like some miniature urban watering hole. They wander aimlessly and I'm not sure what it is they're after. I tell them to go away, but I suspect they might not speak English. Or they're ignoring me, which is just rude.

My heatwave plan of retreat extends to closing the blinds, turning on all the electric fans, and sitting completely still while watching reruns of ER. In one episode, a young woman is diagnosed with what they called "water poisoning." She'd been at a rave, had ingested Ecstasy, and in the meantime had drunk so much water while jumping around to horrible techno music that she'd diluted her own bodily fluids (and the balance of electrolytes) to the point of imminent death.

I was horrified. I looked down at the bottle of water I was holding. It was my fourth one of the day. I didn't want to die convulsing, swollen brained, with my friends and family thinking that I recklessly overhydrate and enjoy techno.

Then I remembered: I don't take Ecstasy, which might cause the feeling of dehydration and the subsequent accidental overhydration. I wasn't dancing and sweating profusely, which causes loss of electrolytes from the body. And I doubted four bottles of water over the course of an entire day could be equated to more than a gallon at under an hour. I was safe. I imagined the spiders and ants at my sink were laughing at my brief paranoia, clicking and chirping in whatever freaky insect language they speak. I vowed to spray them with Raid sometime in the near future.

Water poisoning (or water intoxication) is actually quite rare and its occurence is disproportionate to the number of people who do use Ecstasy without ill effect. Those ill effects, however, when they do occur, can be devastating. And that's only in addition to the terrible taste in music.

For more information, please visit these links:
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Ecstasy.org
About.com: What Are The Effects of Ecstasy?

Parents, Guard Thy Tylenol

According to DrugFree.org, a national study found that millions of teens (grades 7-12) think that using precription or over-the-counter medicine (including cough syrup) to get high is less dangerous than using illegal drugs. From the website:

• Two in five teens (40 percent or 9.4 million) agree that Rx medicines, even if they are not prescribed by a doctor, are "much safer" to use than illegal drugs.
  
  
• Nearly one in five (19 percent or 4.5 million) teens has tried prescription medication (pain relievers such as Vicodin and OxyContin; stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall) to get high.
  
  
• Nearly one-third of teens (31 percent or 7.3 million) believe there’s "nothing wrong" with using Rx medicines without a prescription "once in a while."
  

A few thoughts spring to mind on this subject, but my first reaction was surprise. Did you know that Lays Potato Chips makes a Chile Limon flavor? Me neither! I found them at 7-Eleven this morning on the way to work. My second reaction was one of disappointment. The chips aren't as exciting as I'd hoped they'd be and teens, apparently, aren't as smart as I'd been giving them credit for all these years. It's not entirely their fault, since I imagine that when their parents talk to them about drugs (incidentally, kids who are educated about the risks of drug abuse at home are 50 percent less likely to use drugs), the focus tends to cleave pretty determindely to alcohol, nicotine, and other "hardcore" drugs out in the world. Maybe parents don't think that addressing the subject is necessary, for a number of reasons. They may not think that "medicine" will hold the same fascination for their teens, banking on the memory of their childhood reactions to cough syrup and pill swallowing. Or they, like their teens, are simply ignorant of the dangers that abusing prescription and OTC medications pose.

So, parents. Teens will find ways to abuse drugs if they want to, even going so far as to take them from your medicine cabinet. But you can do your part to prevent this by talking to your children about drugs and drug abuse, early and often, including the threat posed by readily available medications, which can be harmful and, yes, ultimately addictive. Unlike these stupid chips.

Hello, Vanity.

Turns out my boss really is reading this blog. "You should write more about yourself," he says, "so that the readers can get to know you better." Which would be a nice gesture, I suppose, but I wouldn't really know since I was raised by wolves.

I took these questions from a sample personality quiz I found online, the answers to which should tell you more than you care to know about me.

Q. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
A. I guess Sydney or Hong Kong. San Diego's nice, but there's not much left here for me to discover.

Q. What is your favorite dish?
A. Pho, a Vietnamese noodle soup and Carne Asada Fries, a culinary mutant native to Southern California that is as delicious as it is horrifying.

Q. Do you speak any other languages?
A. Some English, less French. I understand Tagalog, as my parents are Filipino, but never learned to speak the language since they thought my sister and I might one day use it against them. They were probably right.

Q. What are you wearing right now?
A. That's kind of inappropriate, but okay. A dress made of address labels and empty drug test mailing boxes. I like to find ways to recycle because I love our planet dearly (and as more than just a friend), so I am continuously searching for ways to impress it with my creativity. Mostly because flexing and writing poetry didn't work.

Q. What is your favorite color?
A. Nevermind, I can't do this.


I am off work in 15 minutes, which is nice. And I've conned one of my friends into cooking dinner for the both of us tonight, which is nicer.

Clorox Doesn't Really Fix Everything

I heard on a radio morning show once that there are people who love the smell of gasoline, rotting garbage, even carion. And most everyone's got that one uncle who enjoys the scent of his own farts. There's some scientific explanation for this, apparently, but let's just call it weird. Not that I'm judging. Me, I really like the smell of household cleaners. Not in the "I really like the smell of household cleaners because I am using them to get high" sort of way, but in a "this is the intoxicating aroma of a nearly germ-free bathroom" sort of way. The scent of bleach and amonia is in a small way also the scent of victory.

Yes, over bacteria, but I'm easy to please.

Cleaning products, I'm learning, also factor quite a bit into the questions I am asked here. A common - and disturbing - bit of lore is that drinking cleaning products, especially bleach, will aid one in "beating" a urine drug test. This, in addition to being absolutely dangerous, is also absolutely false. To illustrate, here is an email excerpt from one of our more knowledgeable customers:

It's amazing how many quick solutions there are. I even had one person say to add a couple drops of bleach to a glass of water. "It'll burn for about an hour, but you'll pass." You better believe I'll pass...on that idea, anyway. Can you imagine people actually doing that? Almost poisoning themselves for a chance at passing the test.

The lesson being: the human body is not a linoleum kitchen floor. It cannot be "cleansed" or wiped blank with disinfectants. Drug test adulteration strips can be used to detect whether a test has anything in it besides urine and/or drugs. Many test have built-in adulteration testing as well. In the end, drinking bleach may give you that antiseptic fresh breath you've always wanted, but the all stomach pain and vomiting might lessen its appeal. And it definitely won't help you pass a drug test.

A Flailing Introduction

One of my duties here at TestCountry, in addition to phone handling the hard-of-hearing, hard-of-thinking, and basically psychotic minority of the drug test ordering multitudes, is answering some of the general questions that come to me via our website. I am asked, in all seriousness, what are the benefits of illegal drug use in general?

Well, I suppose in general, illegal drug use will make you forget how asinine a question this is. This is an exciting job, I tell you.

My boss came to my desk last week and dumped this project in my lap. "See if you can revive the TestCountry Blog," he said. "The guys who worked on it before made a mess of it. I want you to get it going again. You're our Content Writer for the site, and a beacon of hope and goodness in this world, so it should be a piece of cake."

And it is. A delicious, towering cake made of confusion and terror. I love the internet and I love blogs, almost as much as I love Chuck Norris and fish tacos. Almost as much as I love blogging about Chuck Norris and fish tacos. I wasn't so sure how much I would love blogging about drug testing kits. But since I’ve been given freeish rein here and vague details as to whether or not my boss will actually be reading this, I guess I can try to figure it out as I go along. So in the spirit of anonymous internet communication, please feel free to comment with any questions you may have. I will then do my best impersonation of someone semi-competent and answer as best I can. Thanks!