To power level a little bit about testing, I had the fortune of being a recent grad during Covid and lost multiple jobs due to not Trusting the Science

. A lot of those jobs was lab technician at a bunch of different places doing a lot of different testing from hematology, blood chemistry, soil toxicity, cadmium and lead, and even a bit of drug testing.
I’m not going to go over the science of the methodology because
@AltisticRight or
@Otterly could do it better, but I can tell you the typical protocol for any abnormal results anywhere.
Basic protocol:
1. Prepare samples
2. Run samples
3. Review results
For a normal results if you are a tech qualified to approve stuff then review the results and approve.
For abnormal:
1. Check patient/ location/ products history to see if abnormal results are normal
2a. Retest and look if I need to run controls
3a. Run controls or recalibrate if you need to
4a. Approve result
2b. Troubleshoot and check if it’s due to other issues if it’s a sample issue or someone fucked up (Tap water instead of DI water, whoever took/ processed sample was a retard, sample was cold, retard didn’t tell us a patient was underage/ had blood cancer or mono/ has a prescription)
3b. Rerun test after troubleshooting and see if it clears up.
4b. Approve results or order resampling
Typically in some cases whoever reviews results might ask you to send it out to certify, but it depends on the testing location. If you are a big location and have a gold standard they will just do that. I basically got trained up on a lot of shit due to asking to during the pandemic/ getting exploited because they could basically change policy and fuck me.
I can say this despite not really doing cocaine testing via the hair method (mostly did urines because I am certified to read pee despite never doing that for drugs), if they got an absurdly high number they probably retested and the one reported is probably the lowest result of the tests they ran. They probably didn’t average the tests.
Edit: there are some tests where the highest is taken, but usually if there’s a 2SD difference we’d retest. For most of the drug tests I did we’d take a lower result due to that being the protocol at that location.