Drug testing in the Workplace
I have a friend who is about to retire from a couple of decades as a union electrician. He tells me that he’s far more concerned by his fellow workers who have a couple of beers at lunch and proceed to drop tools from scaffolding and don’t always secure heavy items properly than someone who smoked some marijuana the night before after work. He has, on his own time and in the interest of workplace safety, researched something called “impairment testing” and, after fruitlessly trying to interest his union president, shared the fruits of his efforts with me. Before I pass it on let me give you a little background on drug testing in the workplace. I think you’ll be surprised.
According to a survey by the American Management Association, in1986 only 21.5 percent of companies tested employees. By 1996, 81 percent did. The same study showed that the number of Fortune 200 companies that require pre-employment or random drug testing grew from 6 in 1983 to 196 in 1996. Eighty-three percent of employers surveyed believe that testing slows
employee drug use, according to the AMA study. But 80 percent of companies
in the same survey had never done a cost-effectiveness analysis. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a report based on studies by the National Science Foundation and the AMA showing that testing has been ineffective in reducing drug use and has no noticeable impact on reducing either absenteeism or productivity.
The National Academy of Sciences recently found that illegal drugs contribute little to workplace accidents and that off-duty drug use has about the same small effect on worker accidents as off-duty drinking and, in January’s Working USA magazine, two researchers with the Le Moyne
College Institute of Industrial Relations surveyed 63 Silicon Valley companies and found that productivity was 29 percent lower in firms with pre -employment and random testing.
In spite of all of this drug testing is a growing business with revenues approaching a billion dollars a year.
Most of the drug tests used are only marginally accurate and often show false postives. Depending on the method used; Sweat patch, On-site testing, urine testing, incorrect readings are not uncommon. Hair testing is the most controversial of the methods because of concerns that it is discriminatory and can be thrown off by contaminants. Several studies by the National Institute of Drug Abuse show that some drug molecules, whether ingested or picked up from the environment, have an affinity for the pigment melanin and bind more strongly to dark hair than light.
The fastest-growing segment of the drug-testing industry consists of newer and often more error-prone tests. On-site urine testing appeals to private employers because it gives results in minutes and can cost as little as $3 per screening. The problem? Studies of several of these tests, designed to pick up a single drug type such as amphetamines, show they give the right answer as little as one third of the time. Other new tests, which rely on lab analysis of hair and sweat, can be a powerful probe of drug use-but can also be fooled by stray drug molecules from the environment.
Laboratory urine testing, not the far less accurate “on-site” kind but rather the type that gets analyzed by a lab, is often called the “gold standard” test yet Robitussin and some types of diet pills can give a false reading for amphetamines. Migraine medications and anti-depressants can look like LSD. Even Ibuprofen and various antibiotics can appear to be marijuana and a kidney infection or diabetes can cause you to test positive for cocaine. With the millions of drug tests administered mistakes are all too common.
A second, more accurate confirmation test called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, GC-MS exists but is too costly for regular use. When a lab does use GC-MS to identify the entire range of molecules, it is 95 percent to 99 percent accurate. But labs don’t always use the equipment to its full advantage. Accuracy rates are trending downward as employers contract with the lowest-bidding labs. It’s cheaper to use GC-MS to look only for a few fragments of the drug molecules, which raises the risk of mistaking legitimate medicines, herbs, and foods like poppy seeds for illegal drugs.
A key thing to remember is that traces of most drugs including cocaine, heroin and amphetimines in most cases disappear from the body in a day or two. Marijuana traces wind up in the body’s fat cells where they remain for weeks. The effect of the drug will wear off in a few hours but it’s detectable for a long time. A worker can smoke marijuana on a Friday night and test positive the following Friday. What this has to do with workplace safety is lost on me. It smacks of Henry Ford’s “Service Department”, a private police force that visited workers homes to make sure they were living “right” and making sure they went to church on Sunday.
And to top it all off, at many companies, employees who fail the initial screen get no second chance. Most employers, even those who use a lab, don’t confirm positives on pre-employment tests. And, in most cases, it’s perfectly legal not to. There are no regulations, other than a smattering of state laws, regarding testing of nongovernment workers.
Still, few businesses have abandoned drug testing, even though the AMA found
it costs a company $77,000 to find one drug user by testing all employees.
So what is the reason for a company spending that kind of money to weed out the occasional marijuana smoker? There are several. Some companies don’t care about the research. They apparently operate by some sort of faith. “You can’t tell me that drug testing doesn’t work” they say.
Then there are some that don’t know or care about the science. They drug test because it may look good to their shareholders or their customers. And there is another kind that conjures up thoughts of 1930’s Germany… Talking to a manager at a brewery that produces a national beer brand I was surprised by his answers when I asked him if they drug tested their workers… “Yes we do” he said righteously. When I then explained that, since marijuana use can cause a test to come back positive days or even weeks after a worker uses marijuana it is no indication that he was high at work he didn’t miss a beat. “Oh we know that. It’s not about workplace safety.” He said. “We don’t want drug users in the plant regardless if they are high on the job or not. That’s just not the sort of employees we want.” I guess what he really meant was that they don’t want workers who choose to use a different drug after work than his preferred drug.
So what about impairment testing? How does it work? What are the pros and cons? There are several types of these machines but all share certain basic things; they are tailored to the individual, they measure current functionality, and provide instant results. I’ll use one type as an example.
A worker shows up for work and a supervisor, noticing his bleary-eyed stare or unsteady movements, suggests he take the test. The worker sits down at something like video game screen, inserts his card and pushes the “start” button. A ball moves around the screen and, using a mouse, he tries to keep the pointer on the moving ball. His ability to accomplish this is recorded and compared to that workers previously recorded attempts read from the card he inserted at the start of the test. He is not required to meet some arbitrary goal, just do as well as he did when he established his personal “baseline” results the first few times he took the test.
This whole process took less than 5 minutes and told the supervisor whether or not the worker was fit for duty. Could he focus and perform his job or not? It doesn’t tell you “why”, just “if”.
Do you really care why? If he’s been feeling terrible because of the flu, been up all night with a sick child, fighting with his wife, couldn’t sleep because he was worried about his mortgage payment, or has recently injected himself with heroin and is high as a kite he shouldn’t be operating machinery and should go home. Should the problem arise often perhaps the boss might recommend some counseling or medical care.
Such a system would do a lot to improve workplace safety but my friend was told to drop it. His union local’s president said the unions don’t like it because many members would be caught showing up for work impaired by something, legal or illegal and because it gives a manager, who is not a union person, the power to order someone to take an impairment test. Workplace safety for union members apparently was not relevant.
Another friend of mine is an air traffic controller. He is required to give a urine sample at random times after which he is sent off to direct airplanes for several days until the test comes back. That doesn’t seem like a particularly safe way to handle things. The impairment test I described above would be the perfect test, cost a fraction of the urine test, keep him away from the airplanes immediately if he was impaired, and only take 5 minutes.
Science is a wonderful thing. Let’s use it to make a better world instead of relying on inaccurate prejudices and assumptions to make our decisions.
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