Drug & Alcohol Testing in Child Custody

Sometimes in child custody cases one of the parents struggles with an addiction either to drugs or to alcohol. When the parties are no longer together, the court must decide contact for each of the parents with their children. If there is a drug or alcohol addiction, it can impact the type of custody and amount of time a parent will be able to spend with their child. Oftentimes, the other parent will want those visits to be supervised. In order to establish that a parent has an addiction and in order to determine the severity of the addiction, it may be necessary to have the court order mandatory drug and alcohol testing. There are various types of testing that can be done to determine what type of drugs a parent may have been doing and each of the different types of tests have a window of accuracy. In a child custody case, it is always best to request a hair follicle test as this provides the longest history of drug usage for a parent. In addition to drug testing, if a parent has an alcohol addiction, there are tests that can measure the consistency in which a parent consumes excess alcohol. These tests are critical when a parent has an addiction as being under the influence of drugs or alcohol while caring for children can greatly put them at risk of physical harm due to neglect and/or abuse.