Why Do We Drug Test?

Why Do We Drug Test?

(referenced reports included at the end of this article)

You are working at your dream job when you are selected for a random, mandatory, drug test. You readily give a urine sample since you do not use illicit drugs. Two days later your supervisor calls you into his office and informs you that you failed the drug test and you are no longer employed there. This scenario plays out across the country more often than you would think. Most people are under the mistaken belief that drug tests are infallible. Nothing could be farther from the truth

On September 15, 1986 Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12564 establishing the Federal Workplace Drug Testing Program. Then came the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988. These edicts made drug testing mandatory for Federal employees and contractors. Since then drug testing has become quite prevalent in state and local governments and the private sector from pre-employment screening to random and for-cause testing. This is disturbing for several reasons. Drug testing is an unproven technology even though the government and the companies that make the drug-test kits would like you to believe otherwise. Studies have shown that they don’t work, don’t deter drug use, can be quite costly, and are easy to beat.

Proponents of drug testing say that it is a reliable way to improve safety and worker productivity in the workplace, “yet the fact is that urinalysis has been imposed on millions of American workers involuntarily without so much as a single scientifically controlled study to show that it is a safe or effective means of promoting workplace safety” (Gieringer 2). These drug tests also can’t tell when or how much a person has ingested or whether they are impaired at work. Most of the estimated 40 million users in this country are defined as casual users. These are people who use only occasionally and don’t allow their use to interfere with their work as shown by, “a Postal Service study . . . showed that drug using workers were largely reliable: drug users had a 93.4% attendance record versus 95.8% for others, and 85% of users kept their jobs, versus 89.5% of non-users” (Gieringer 3). As shown by this study, drug use does not interfere with a person’s ability to perform his or her job.

Our high school and middle school children are even being tested randomly now. The most common reason being cited is that illicit drug use needs to be stopped in its infancy before our kids get hooked. In reality, random drug tests do not stop school kids from using drugs. In fact, the only federally commissioned study had some surprising results after studying the correlation between drug use in our schools and random drug testing for four years. The study revealed that, “Marijuana prevalence was 4.7 percentage points lower in the schools with such random testing; but the use of other illicit drugs was 3.3 percentage points higher” (Yamaguchi 12). Since marijuana stays in your system longer than other drugs, and people are going to get high whether it is legal or not (see prohibition) people are going to switch to drugs that leave your system quicker, thereby being harder to detect. In other words, if you want your kids to switch from pot to meth then institute random drug testing in your school.

Paying for drug tests that don’t actually stop drug use doesn’t make a lot of sense either. It is not an intelligent use of public money. Randomly testing an entire school system can be quite costly. One school district in Dublin, Ohio canceled its $35,000 per year drug testing program. Out of the 1473 students tested, only 11 tested positive. That means they spent approximately $3200 per student who tested positive, not a real cost effective way to spend their money.

For those who wish to continue using drugs and are subjected to random drug tests at work there are other options. There are four categories of products that guarantee that they will help a person pass a drug test: “1) dilution substances that are added to a urine specimen at the time that it is collected or are ingested before an individual submits a urine specimen; 2) cleansing substances that detoxify or cleanse the urine and are ingested prior to the time that an individual submits a urine specimen; 3) adulterants that are used to destroy or alter the chemical make-up of drugs and are added to a urine specimen at the time that it is provided for testing and; 4) synthetic or drug-free urine that is substituted in place of an individual’s specimen and provided for testing” (Cramer 1) If you go onto the Internet and do a web search for drug tests there are literally thousands of sites that will sell you products that you can use to defeat a drug test. For example, “According to SAMHSA: (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), approximately 400 different products are available to adulterate urine samples.” (Cramer 5). Anyone that can access the Internet can now beat a drug test regardless of what kind it is or how it is administered.

In the face of this overwhelming evidence, I think that it is time for us to quit obsessing over drug tests and use that money to educate people so that they will not want to use drugs in the first place.

Works Cited
Cramer, Robert J. “Products to Defraud Drug Tests Are Widely Available.” 17 May 2005. pp. 1, 5. 22 November 2006. United States Government Accountability Office.

Gieringer, Dale H Ph. D. “The Untold Costs of Drug Testing Abuse.” 1992. 
pp 2,3.17 November 2006. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Yamaguchi, Ryoko, Lloyd D. Johnson, and Patrick M. O’Malley. “Drug Testing in Schools: Policies, Practices, and Association With Student Drug Use.” 2003. p. 12. 21 November 2006. American Civil Liberties Union.