Drug Problem in Full Retreat, Military Says

The armed forces, after waging an all-out battle against drug abuse for more than six years, are ready to declare victory in their part of President Reagan’s “crusade” against the “cancer of drugs.”

Using compulsory drug tests for everyone in the services coupled with expulsion or other certain punishment for those who fail, the military has boasted of slashing the number of drug users in uniform by two-thirds. In 1980, 27% of all servicemen and women who were polled by the Defense Department admitted that they had used illegal drugs in the last 30 days, a figure that had declined to 9% by 1985.

That, said David J. Armor, the Pentagon’s manpower chief, represents “the biggest drop in drug abuse anywhere we know of in this society.” Reagan has cited the military’s record as “a model” for fighting drugs in the civilian sector, where the White House is promoting widespread drug testing.

But many experts say the Pentagon’s tactics--surprise and deterrence, which have a long and distinguished military tradition--can be applied only within the confines of military life. They cannot easily be adapted, these authorities say, to combatting drug use among civilians.

“Over the years, the decisions of the Supreme Court, furthered by acts of Congress, have insulated the military from many of the constitutional protections that civilians enjoy,” said Allan Adler, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Altogether, the measures allow the military to meet what it considers its paramount needs--to maintain discipline and protect the chain of command.”

Among civilians, by contrast, constitutional protections weigh against mandatory drug testing and summary punishment for those who fail.

“The uniformed services are a very special part of society,” said Red Evans, a spokesman for the National Federation of Federal Employees. “The courts have ruled that what can be done there cannot always be done in the rest of society.”

On March 1, for example, U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan here in Washington blocked a proposed Army program of mandatory random drug testing of civilian Army employees, declaring that it violated the employees’ Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The Transportation Department and the Customs Service, an arm of the Treasury Department, are among the few government civilian agencies that administer drug tests, and both agencies’ programs are being challenged in court.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans last April upheld the Customs Service’s testing program, which involves only employees seeking promotions who carry firearms, have access to classified information or are directly involved in interdicting illegal drugs. A federal appeals court in California, by contrast, cited the Fourth Amendment in striking down the Transportation Department’s program of testing crews of trains involved in accidents.

The Supreme Court is expected to take up the question when it reconvenes in October, and officials say the Reagan Administration has delayed proposing a drug-test program covering all federal employees until after the high court has made its decision.

Even servicemen and women have some protections against the arbitrary use of drug tests. For example, to win a court-martial stemming from a drug test, military prosecutors must prove that the test was conducted randomly.

But, in practice, violations of that rule are hard to prove.

“If a commander doesn’t like the way Pvt. Jones parts his hair, he can order all of Jones’ squadron to submit to urinalyses,” said Mark L. Waple, a Fayetteville, N.C., attorney who has defended hundreds of servicemen in drug cases across the nation. “It has the appearance of randomness, but it’s not random.”

Testing is only half of the military’s war against drugs. The services are also stiffening the penalties for getting caught.

For many enlisted men and women and almost all officers, a positive result means the end of a military career and a discharge that may taint their employment record for life. Commanding officers have wide latitude in punishing those who test positive, and Waple says more and more officers are summarily discharging them rather than resorting to the more elaborate process of a court-martial, which carries heavier penalties.

Whether or not drug testing in the military is usually random, there is little doubt that drug use in the services has declined. Bolstering the polling data are the results of the mandatory drug tests, which show a similarly steep decline in drug use.

Not so clear is whether the military’s tough anti-drug campaigns deserve all the credit. Some experts point out that long lines of applicants at the services’ recruitment centers--attracted by recent military pay raises and the patriotic climate generated by the Reagan Administration--have given the services the luxury of turning away potential recruits with any history of drug use.

Reagan’s tough anti-drug program for the military has its roots in the Vietnam War. Drug addiction was common among soldiers who returned from Southeast Asia, Pentagon officials say, and the Defense Department had judged that drugs posed a serious threat both to safety and to military discipline. A 1981 Defense Department survey found drug use in the military about as common as in the civilian sector.

But it was a 1981 crash of an electronic warfare plane aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, linked to drug use by the pilots, that jolted the services into action. The Pentagon quickly authorized widespread urine tests and armed base commanders with mobile drug-screening equipment.

Today, Navy personnel face drug tests 2 1/2 times a year on average; Army officers and recruits, once a year, and Air Force personnel, once every three years.

Starting in June, all of the services plan to administer drug tests to all recruits. In each of the last two years, the services conducted roughly 3 million tests, at a cost of roughly $50 million a year.

The armed services’ drug-testing program is believed, even by the harshest scientific critics of drug testing, to be the most reliable one in operation.

Such was not the case in the early 1980s, when the sudden rise in drug testing exposed major cracks in the system. About 51% of the drug tests the Army conducted between April, 1982, and November, 1983, were later found by a blue-ribbon Defense Department commission to have been mishandled.

During the same period, one Air Force lab had an error rate of 60% in processing its drug tests, and the Navy had to throw out 1,800 disciplinary actions because an Oakland laboratory had failed to keep accurate records.

The problems prodded the Defense Department to take several steps to improve the program. Positive results in an initial screening are now confirmed by a second, more sensitive, laboratory procedure. There is better documentation of those who have access to urine samples. Moreover, rigorous quality control and oversight procedures have been instituted for commercial laboratories that analyze the samples.

“It’s the most proficient test program going,” said Dr. Arthur McBay, chief toxicologist in the office of the North Carolina medical examiner and a frequent critic of drug testing in the military and elsewhere. “I can’t fault them (on most technical grounds), because testing in the civilian sector is deplorable.”

Lapses Alleged

But many civilian experts maintain that lapses still occur even in the military, causing erroneous test results that could cost servicemen and women their jobs and futures.

In 1986, for example, Sgt. James Tyrone Cecil, who served as drug and alcohol coordinator for his company in the 18th Airborne Corps at Ft. Bragg, N.C., was court-martialed for arranging clean specimens for six soldiers for $75 each.

And some victims of the military’s drug tests insist that irregularities are continuing.

Two months before he could have left the Army with a lifetime military pension, for example, Sgt. 1st Class David Gardner, a mess sergeant in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Ft. Bragg, was snared in a drug-test sweep of his company. His test results came back positive for marijuana and cocaine, although the 19-year Army veteran maintains he has never used drugs.

Gardner could have been court-martialed, a process that would have required a jury trial and the presentation of a great volume of evidence. Instead, Gardner’s commander ordered him out of the Army on a general discharge, a move he could make virtually unchallenged.

Now a civilian, Gardner is contesting his dismissal because he contends the Army mistakenly identified him as a drug user. Waple, his attorney, plans to argue in court that Gardner was “the victim of a cruel practical joke” in which his specimen was switched with that of a drug abuser.

Gardner says that in his defense he showed his commanding officer an anonymous note he had received warning him “to stay away from little bottles,” and evidence that a lab technician at Ft. Bragg could be bribed to switch samples. But the officer, Gardner claims, waved Gardner’s evidence away.