THE URINE TEST

The old stories are sometimes the best and anyone who has ever been involved in drug and alcohol programs has heard this story, here used in Three Seconds by Roslund and Hellstrom, in one form or another.

[Although during my own membership of a special professional panel on drug and alcohol abuse our main concern was those dentists who thought that six cans of strong lager for breakfast was a suitably nourishing start to the day.]

Every day in every prison, every waking hour was about drugs: how to get them in, and how to use them without it being discovered by the regular urine tests. A relative who came to visit was also a relative who could be forced to smuggle in some urine, their own, urine that was clean and would test negative.

Once in his first few weeks in Osteraker, some mouthy Serb got his girlfriend to piss into a couple of mugs, the content of which was then sold for a great deal of money. None of them tested positive, despite the fact that more than half of them were under the influence, but the tests did show something else, and that was that every man in the unit was pregnant.