muskrat89 said:
Well, I can't speak for Canadian chemists, but here, all of those "false positive" stories are myths. NeoCitran doesn't equal heroin, poppy seeds don't result in positives, etc. I attended a pretty extensive seminar on employee drug testing that reviewed in a lot of detail all of those issues. When you take a test here, you list on the form any medication that you are currently taken. All test results are reviewed by a physician, and positive results are re-tested before declared positive.
Drug Policy:
The ACLU Drug Law Reform Project is a division of the national ACLU. Our goal is to end punitive drug policies that cause the widespread violation of constitutional and human rights, as well as unprecedented levels of incarceration.
Home : Drug Policy : Drug Testing
Drug Testing: An Overview (10/21/2002)
The growth of a drug pseudo-science has opened up a new search frontier for those seeking to expose drug users. As "scientific" rumors of an American work force and an American youth population withered with drug use abound, authorities ranging from employers to school boards have rushed to join in the war on drugs. Their weapon: drug testing.
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Drug Testing Programs are Ineffective and Inaccurate:
Because urine testing is based on an analysis of metabolites associated with the drug in question, and because alcohol and cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine all pass through the body within 24-48 hours, leaving no metabolites, marijuana is the only substance that is easily detected with urinalysis. Drugs that have a more significant impact on employment or work performance, such as alcohol and other illegal drugs, are not effectively tested for with urinalysis.
Source: "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment," ACLU pamphlet on drug testing in the workforce (hereafter, "Drug Testing," pg. 13, et. al., link provided below.
Moreover, drug tests such as urinalysis can give false positive results, because they test for drug metabolites - inactive drug by-products that the body produces as it processes drugs for excretion - rather than for the presence of the drugs themselves. Poppy seeds notoriously can result in positives tests for morphine. Immunoassay, the less expensive common form of drug testing, often cannot distinguish between illegal drug metabolites and those generated by the consumption of over-the-counter decongestants and antihistamines. And even the more sophisticated, expensive GC/MS urinalysis test can turn up positive test results in response to legal prescription medications like codeine and marinol.
Source: "Drug Testing," pg. 18, link provided below.
At every step of the process, human error can add to the inaccuracies of drug testing programs.
For more information about the psuedo-science of drug testing, and especially about its effects in the workplace, read "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment".
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Drug Testing in the Workforce:
Research results indicate that drug use does not pose significant productivity or safety problems in the work force. In 1994, the National Academy of Sciences published results from a three year research effort compiling research resulting from all major studies of drug testing program effectiveness. The report concluded, "the data . . . do not provide clear evidence of the deleterious effects of drugs other than alcohol on safety and other job performance indicators."
Source: "Drug Testing," from 1994 NAS study "Under the Influence: Drugs and the American Work Force," (hereafter, NAS study) available at above site.
Though frequently inaccurate and ineffective, drug testing is extremely expensive. Texas Intruments reports that their drug testing program costs $100 per employee. Drug testing products and services are a multi-billion dollar industry. But the incidence of drug use in the workforce is very low. The federal government reported in 1990 that only 0.5% of tested employees tested positive. The same year, the government spent $11.7 million on its drug testing program. That works out to $77,000 per identified drug user.
Source: "Drug Testing," pgs. 4, 14.
The NAS looked for and was unable to find evidence of drug testing programs' deterrent effects. Studies which appear to show a decrease in positive test rates since the implementation of drug testing programs usually don't adjust for the expansion of such programs' testing groups to include not only for-cause drug tests but also suspicionless drug tests. That is, as drug-testing programs have expanded, they have tested more and more people who aren't suspected of drug use, improving their numbers and subjecting thousands of non-users to invasive testing procedures.
Source: "Drug Testing," pg. 15 from NAS study.
Perhaps the greatest cost of invasive employee drug testing programs is the consequent loss of worker morale.
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Drug Testing in Schools:
Studies of college students have shown that there is little or no difference in the grade point average, career aspiration, or participation in extracurricular activities between students who use marijuana and those who don't.
Source: "Drug Testing," pg. 12.
Nonetheless, another area where the traditional standard for searches has been relaxed is in the drug testing of school children. In part because of the guardian-like role schools play in the lives of children, the Supreme court has lowered the requirements for searching students (or drug testing them) to reasonable suspicion.
Source: Case history of this is summarized in Scalia, Vernonia decision, 1995, link provided below.
In 1995, in Vernonia v. Acton, the Supreme Court upheld suspicionless school drug testing of athletes, on the grounds that athletes frequently engage in dangerous activity, and are thus more likely to injure themselves if playing while under the influence of drugs. The Court also stated that as school athletes routinely face mandatory physicals and other similar invasions of privacy, they have lower expectations of privacy than the average student. The Court specified that its decision should not be seen as a justification for further expansion of drug testing programs.
Source: Scalia, Vernonia v. Acton, 1995, link provided above.
Nonetheless, schools have used this decision to institute broader and broader drug testing policies, some introducing student consent to random drug testing as a requirement for involvement in extra-curricular activities. Some of these policies have since been upheld by lower courts.
In 1999, a school in Lockney, Texas became the first to implement a universal testing policy of all students, grades six through twelve, regardless of particular suspicion or extra-curricular involvement. This testing policy was later struck down by a federal court.
The ACLU Drug Policy Litigation Project (DPLP) believes such drug testing policies to be both invasive and counter-productive. Involvement in extra-curricular activities has been shown to be one of the most sure-fire ways to keep kids out of trouble. The project has been involved in two school drug testing cases, in Lockney, Texas, and Tecumseh, Oklahoma. To find out more about this issue, and to see what the Project is doing to protect students' rights, visit A Test You Can't Study For.
The Drug Policy Alliance has put together an action pack for parents and educators who are opposed to student drug testing. To learn more, please visit www.drugtestingfails.org.
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Drug Testing of Welfare Recipients:
According to a 1996 study by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, differences between the proportion of welfare and non-welfare recipients using illegal drugs are not statistically significant. There is little justification for singling out a population group that does not display significantly higher drug abuse than the general population.
Source: National Institutes of Health Press Release, Oct. 24, 1996 (available at above link).
While other states have chosen to test applicants for cash assistance for substance abuse, only Michigan has chosen urinalysis for its method of testing. Other states have specifically rejected urinalysis, finding the test too invasive and also finding that the testing angers the applicant and recipient populations and actually interferes with the ability of the state to work with this population in a beneficial way. By distancing the target population, states are less likely to be able to create effective treatment programs aimed at reducing substance abuse that interferes with employment. If benefits are cut off simultaneously, this population will be severely hurt.
DPLP has challenged Michigan's drug testing policy on behalf of a group of welfare recipients, arguing that it violates their Fourth Amendment rights to protection from unreasonable searches. To find out more about this case, see Marchwinski v. Michigan.
The majority of the population has not voted in favor of Fourth Amendment protections since the amendment was added as a requirement for ratifying the Constitution in the 1780s. As Ira Glasser points out in "American Drug Laws: the New Jim Crow," one major reason for this is that a majority of Americans have not felt their Fourth Amendment protected rights threatened since British troops ransacked homes in search of paper after the passing of the Stamp Act before the Revolutionary War. Until recently, the only common (indeed, all too common) victims of unreasonable searches were minorities and criminals. But with the recent serge to the spotlight of drug testing issues, in the work place and in schools, average Americans are at last beginning to feel the bite of invasive search policies.
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