Toward a National System of Expanded Testing of Existing Urine Specimens: The Drug Outbreak Testing Service (DOTS)

Abstract

Background

NIDA’s National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS) was established in 2014 with the mission of identifying and monitoring emerging drugs in the United States. Identification of emerging drugs has been complicated, however, by the rapid development of novel psychoactive substances such that users often cannot identify and report the drugs they have ingested. Biologic testing of urine, hair or blood is the only way to reliably identify the substances recently used. Unfortunately, the large number of up-to-date tests required is beyond the resources available to most organizations.

Methods

The DOTS study tested the feasibility of recruiting organizations to submit up to 25 de-identified urine specimens for testing for approximately 240 drugs, at no cost to them. The results were for epidemiologic purposes only and not for clinical use. Eleven sites who had questions about their patients or the results of their organization’s more limited urinalysis screens participated. These sites included drug treatment programs, medical examiners, hospitals and a criminal justice testing program.

Results

Extensive polydrug use and geographic differences in the drugs detected were found. All sites found the DOTS collaborating laboratory’s test results to be very useful for understanding the types of drugs being used recently and to assess the adequacy of their testing protocols.

Conclusions

The U.S. should consider establishing a program of expanded testing of already collected de-identified urine specimens in order to identify emerging drugs and track local patterns of use and availability.

Keywords:

• Drug surveillance
• drug testing
• toxicology
• urinalysis
• emerging drugs
• polydrug use

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all of the sites that participated in this study. The authors would also like to thank Naheed Ahmed for her assistance with this report.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article. The sponsor did not have any role in the study design, collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, or writing of this report.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) as part of the National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS) project under Grant number 3U01DA038360-04S2.