Drug Test Effectiveness Questioned : Panelists Urge Increased U.S. Spending to Curb Dealers

New York’s Mayor Edward I. Koch and two medical men raised questions Sunday about the effectiveness of voluntary testing as a weapon in the war against drugs and urged more emphasis on increased federal financing for programs to halt the drug traffic.

Calling the urine test that President Reagan took Saturday “totally silly,” Koch said that “the person who is using drugs is not going to volunteer.” He urged mandatory testing for individuals, such as pilots and members of police and fire departments, who are responsible for the lives of others, but said that “the rest of it is just simply show-boating.”

Dr. David Musto, a psychiatry professor at the Yale Medical School who has studied the history of drug abuse and a participant with the mayor on the CBS-TV program “Face the Nation,” conceded that urine testing in certain occupations “might be appropriate.” But he warned that it may prove to be “the atomic bomb in the war on drugs.”

Harm to Civilians Feared

“It is capable of causing enormous damage to the civilian population if it is applied without restraint, without understanding, without privacy, without due process,” Musto said. Calling it an instrument that was not available to the government during previous waves of narcotics addiction at the turn of the century and in the Prohibition Era, he said: “It’s going to have to be thought through very carefully.

“As the zeal rises and the moral fervor increases . . . urine testing may seem the weapon that will wipe it (drug addiction) out, and . . . that’s a very dangerous situation for ordinary citizens,” Musto said.

Koch told another participant in the program, Carlton E. Turner, director of the President’s Office of Drug Abuse Policy, that the government “ought to be interdicting the drugs before they enter the United States,” and urged increased financing for programs to combat imports and to educate the public against drug use.

‘Money Not the Problem’

Turner replied that President Reagan has said “there will be money,” but left the amount open. He maintained that “money is not the problem,” that solutions will come when society says “drug use is intolerable . . . no excuse.”

Turner said the government has been “interdicting with the military since 1981,” but that “you’re never going to be able to stop” the drug problem “until you design a program to hold the user responsible.” He estimated that federal programs against drugs now cost $2.5 billion, exclusive of costs for military operations in the war on drugs.

The program’s fourth participant, Dr. Ronald Dougherty, medical director of the drug unit at the Benjamin Rush Clinic in Syracuse, N.Y., noted that a positive result in a test for marijuana would not necessarily indicate use affecting a worker’s job performance. The drug might have been used 10 days earlier, he said, or it might be no more than a “false positive” resulting from use of an anti-inflammatory drug.

Solution of the problem will require “a lot of money . . . a lot of time . . . education, prevention, treatment . . . and definitely heavier laws against those people who are heavy drug dealers and sanctions against . . . source countries for heroin and for cocaine,” Dougherty said.