Navigating a Drug Test Order in Oklahoma
So I want to start a series of discussions about substance use and child custody and some issues that can come up both with prescription medications and also with non-prescription substances you might be using. To start with, let’s talk about the issue of the dreaded drug test. So what should you do if you are facing a drug test, you’ve been called to take either a urine test or a hair follicle or a nail bed?
My name is Brian L. Jackson, I’m a Tulsa father’s rights attorney here with Dads.Law and we’re going to talk about the dreaded drug test and what should you do. So if you’re facing a motion for drug testing and the court hasn’t ordered it yet, let’s start there.
My first advice would be or my first thought on this is it’s not a bad idea to go ahead and get drug tested voluntarily before you’re ordered. Now I think it’s probably as a starting point a good idea to get with a lawyer, but the reason is that will give you an idea of what you’re dealing with before it becomes a public record. If you fail the drug test quietly, nobody has to know you took the drug test.
If you fail it, then you know you need to take some steps and generally those steps involve it if you fail it because of the prescription you have, make sure you have the prescription handy. If you fail it because of something else you’ve been doing, then do whatever you need to do to stop doing that and address that problem and something that you can demonstrate on paper.
Take Action to Address the Problem
Generally, a good idea with that is to go to your primary care physician and see about getting a referral for a drug and alcohol evaluation. And that way if you know you’re going to test hot, you get ordered to do it, you test hot, you can already say to the court, look, I recognize I have a problem, and here’s what I’m doing about it, which looks a lot better than if you come up hot and you’re not doing anything about it. Generally, the court’s going to be more concerned if you’re engaged in that sort of behavior and not taking action to correct it than if you have a history of doing it and you’ve taken action to correct it.
Now obviously it goes without saying some situations are worse than others. In modern and current family law litigation in Oklahoma and certainly in Tulsa County, going hot for cannabis is not a humongous problem provided that you have your card. Now there are some caveats to that because you don’t want to be intoxicated around the kid in any event and you don’t want to use or smoke around the kid for obvious reasons. But as a general rule, cannabis use is probably not a per se issue.
What could be a bigger problem is if you, for example, are taking prescription narcotics, you take prescription opioids, if you take a prescription like any kind of a benzodiazepine or if you have a prescription for any kind of an amphetamine drug or like an amphetamine analog drug because those will show up on a drug test and those are the kind of things that will make a court concerned because those substances are prime substances of abuse, particularly anything opioid-related or anything amphetamine-related is going to be a problem.
How to Handle Prescription Medications
So if you know you’re on one of those kind of prescriptions, number one, make sure that you are showing that prescription at the drug testing site and make sure you can document to the court later that you have, not only that you have the prescription, but also that you are using your medication correctly under the prescription. Now that means you shouldn’t test with like a humongous amount of that in your blood or your hair or on your nails because generally speaking, you’re not going to be looking at massive amounts of that substance when you are tested like that.
But in any event, it is important that you have the script handy and that you can demonstrate to the court that you’re using the medication under the prescription. Also in an extreme case, if it’s still a problem, and consult with a lawyer about this, it might be worth considering as well whether you can use an alternative substance that isn’t going to be within one of those categories that the courts tend to have a problem with. And again, that’s something to consult with a lawyer about, something to consult with your physician about. But in some cases, those types of drugs can just bluntly speaking flat out cause you a problem. And sometimes the best alternative is to find an alternative.
Contact Us for a Low-cost Strategy Session
If you are facing the drug test though, it is important, you do need a good lawyer, and one place you can find a good Oklahoma family lawyer is at Dads.Law where fathers are not disposable.