Very interesting, thanks Yashaswini. In the UK taking a drug is not actually a criminal offence, it is the possession of a drug (or dealing) that is against the law! I wonder what angle they will try and prove using hair testing. The tale seems to be developing though, keep me updated if you see more updates!
Thanks
Tom

Hello Susan, thanks for your question.
In my opinion the ‘level of use’ interpretation is at best controversial with hair tests. If someone is interpreting the data based on a single value then I would want to see the peer reviewed data to back their answer up. I would say that it takes a fair amount of reading and understanding of: hair growth, mechanism of drug incorporation, drug metabolism and analytical techniques to be able to put any result into perspective. This level of understanding would likely be beyond most people who are trained to collect samples only.
I hope this helps, thanks again.
Tom

Hi Jane,
Thanks for the question. The chemical structures of ephedrine and amphetamine are different so any mass spectrometry testing would be able to tell them apart. If the initial test was by immunoassay then ephedrine could give rise to a positive test. I would have thought most labs would not report based on this though. If a lab completed an immunoassay test first the usual procedure is to then analyse via GC-MS or LC-MS which should tell them directly which type of compounds have been detected.
Without seeing the report and/or the data it is hard to comment directly. If you have any more detail of the tests or the report please feel free to get in contact.
Thanks
Tom

Thanks for the link Yashashwini,
That’s an interesting story, exactly the kind of scenario the cricket authorities are looking at. The drugs alleged to have been used don’t improve performance so would be classed as social drugs. There looks a lot more to it though than drug use only. I’ll keep an eye out for more info on this one!
Tom