Was Britney’s Hair Full of Drugs?
February 25, 2007
aerybritney
Britney Spears
Rumor has it that Britney Spears may have shaved off all her hair last weekend to avoid having it drug tested during her child custody battle with Kevin Federline. How much can you learn by testing someone’s hair?
A lot. A bundle of hair about the thickness of a pencil can tell chemists what specific drugs someone has used and provide a rough timeline of when she used them. Narcotics like cocaine, meth, ecstasy, and PCP introduce toxins to the bloodstream that are then incorporated into each hair as it forms in the follicle. Urine and blood only retain evidence of these toxins for a week or so, but hair can hold on to them indefinitely. (When administered correctly, hair tests are about as accurate as urinalysis.)
Head hair grows about half an inch every month, so a woman with shoulder-length hair carries around a two-year record of her drug use. To test her, scientists would cut off a strip of about three months’ worth of growth and then cut it into pieces for analysis. This segmentation allows them to approach each strand the way a dendrochronologist would approach a tree trunk. Like the cross section of a tree, a strand of hair can store information for thousands of years: In the early 1990s, scientists studying the hair of Peruvian and Chilean mummies found evidence of cocaine use dating back to 1000 B.C.
Entry Filed under: IDOL
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