Situations

Some of this you can plan around. Some of it arrives with a date on it: a flight booked, a test scheduled at work, a plastic pot handed to you in a clinic. There is a page here for each of those.

They share a method. Each one quotes the published rules in their own words — a government's screening guide, a federal regulation, a health service's own leaflet — and each one says plainly where nothing is published at all. The second half of that is the part worth having. In all three of these situations, the confident answers you find online rest on nobody in particular, and it is hard to tell from the outside.

None of these pages tells you what to do with your own body. Where there is a decision in it, the page points you at the person who can make that decision with you.

One room, three situationsThe same room stands behind all three of the pages below. What changes from one to the next is who is waiting outside the door, and what they are waiting for.

Flying

The airport and the cabin. What the UK's published hand luggage rules say, what US cabin regulation says about the seat belt sign, and the two places — US screening, and anything an airline might do — where this site has nothing to quote you.

Workplace drug testing

What the US transport rule actually does when a worker cannot give a sample: who is in the room, how long you get, and who decides. US rule only.

Hospital samples

What a urine sample is collected for, in the words of the services that ask for one, and the question that gives you something to say while the pot is in your hand.

There are more of these than three pages. Police custody and court-ordered testing, military testing, anti-doping in sport, a hospital ward after surgery, prison, an exam hall, a festival, a shared flat or a dormitory: each puts somebody outside a door with a reason to wait, and each is real. This site knows they are and has not yet written them up. Where it has nothing checked to quote you, it says nothing rather than guessing.

If none of those is the situation you are in, getting help is about the appointment itself, and the Doctor Brief is a one-page sheet you can hand across a desk instead of starting from nothing.