![]() ![]() Employee assistance programs (EAPs) help people facing emotional, health, financial or substance abuse problems that can affect job performance. NASA, for example, has long used task-performance tests to determine whether astronauts and pilots are unfit for work – whether the cause is substance abuse, fatigue, or physical illness.ĭrug tests don’t prevent accidents because they don’t address the root problems that lead to substance abuse. And even after a 1994 Amtrak accident in which several lives were lost, investigators discovered the train engineer had a well known history of alcohol, not drug, abuse.Ĭomputer-assisted performance tests, which measure hand-eye coordination and response time, are a better way of detecting whether employees are up to the job. There has never been a commercial airline accident linked to pilot drug use. Firstly, drug-related employee impairment in safety-sensitive jobs is rare. Yet even in these jobs, random drug testing does not guarantee safety. Even the poppy seeds found in baked goods can produce a positive result for heroin.Īlertness and sobriety are, of course, imperative for certain occupations, such as train engineers, airline pilots, truck drivers and others. Over-the-counter antiinflammatory drugs like Ibuprofen have shown up positive on the marijuana test. Depronil, a prescription drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease, has shown up as an amphetamine on standard drug tests. Sometimes drug tests fail to distinguish between legal and illegal substances. Employers who conduct random drug tests on workers who are not suspected of using drugs are policing private behavior that has no impact on job performance. Nor do they distinguish between occasional and habitual use.ĭrug testing is designed to detect and punish conduct that is usually engaged in off-duty and off the employer’s premises – that is, in private. A positive drug test only reveals that a drug was ingested at some time in the past. A 1994 National Academy of Sciences report found workplace drug use “ranges from a modest to a moderate extent,” and noted that much of reported drug use “may be single incident, perhaps even at events like office parties.”įurthermore, drug tests are not work-related because they do not measure on-the-job impairment. – From a letter to the ACLU describing a workplace drug test.Ĭlaims of billions of dollars lost in employee productivity are based on guesswork, not real evidence.ĭrug abuse in the workplace affects a relatively small percentage of workers. I am a 40-year-old mother of three: nothing I have ever done in my life equals or deserves the humiliation, degradation and mortification I felt.” “I waited for the attendant to turn her back before pulling down my pants, but she told me she had to watch everything I did. If five percent yielded false positive results (a conservative estimate of false positive rates) that means 1.1 million people who could have been fired, or denied jobs – because of a mistake. In 1992, an estimated 22 million tests were adminstered. Police Department admitted it used urine samples collected for drug tests to screen female employees for pregnancy – without their knowledge or consent.įurthermore, human error in the lab, or the test’s failure to distinguish between legal and illegal substances, can make even a small margin of error add up to a huge potential for false positive results. Urinalysis reveals not only the presence of illegal drugs, but also the existence of many other physical and medical conditions, including genetic predisposition to disease – or pregnancy. The lab procedure is a second invasion of privacy. ![]() Even indirect observation can be degrading typically, workers must remove their outer garments and urinate in a bathroom in which the water supply has been turned off. Often, another person is there to observe the employee to ensure there is no specimen tampering. ![]() However routine drug tests have become, they’re still intrusive. But they shouldn’t have the right to require employees to prove their innocence by taking a drug test. In fact, workplace drug testing is up 277 percent from 1987 – despite the fact that random drug testing is unfair, often inaccurate and unproven as a means of stopping drug use.īut because there are few laws protecting our privacy in the workplace, millions of American workers are tested yearly – even though they aren’t suspected of drug use.Įmployers have the right to expect workers not to be high or drunk on the job. Today, in some industries, taking a drug test is as routine as filling out a job application. (Access this report for detailed discussion of the issue.)
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