Profits Drive Dubious Drug Tests
“We maintain a drug-free workplace” will soon appear in corporate advertising alongside “We are an equal-opportunity employer.” Corporate America is enthusiastically enlisting in the war on drugs. The call now is to mandate anti-drug programs as a condition for receiving government contracts. In congressional testimony last month Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci suggested ordering all defense contractors to institute “drug-free workplace” programs, a move that could affect 3.2 million American workers. The recent revelation of drug use by White House employees led President Reagan to say that the incidents proved the need for widespread drug testing.
The issue no longer is whether employers will have “drug-free workplace” programs, but what form those programs will take. A study prepared by the American Management Assn. more than a year ago concluded that the most effective program is the training of supervisory personnel to recognize and detect signs of drug use on the job. Drug testing was perceived as a panacea that actually was receiving too much emphasis at the expense of other approaches. Despite this warning, random urine testing on a broad scale is the most prominent feature of the programs being pushed by federal officials. Why?
A clue emerged from a conference for 200 top corporate executives in Washington in early June. The executives were treated to a remarkable speech by Reagan, who attributed America’s drug problems to the student activists of the 1960s.
“The students of that period who used illegal drugs in high school or college have in many cases taken their destructive drug habits with them into their places of employment,” the President said. The solution offered by a long parade of high government officials: Screen employees, make them take urine tests.
The conference sponsor was Hoffman-LaRoche, a New Jersey pharmaceutical company that earned $300 million last year providing drug tests and laboratory analyses to other companies and government agencies. Hoffman-LaRoche’s biggest customer for drug tests: the Pentagon. Drug testing is one of the fastest-growing industries in America, well on its way to becoming a billion-dollar-per-year industry. Companies are scrambling to market new products, including a home testing kit for parents so that they can mail in urine samples taken from their children. Many of the employers who are jumping on the drug-testing bandwagon are chiefly concerned with corporate images rather than wayward employees. Testing programs are perceived as “good public relations” and being “responsive” to government efforts. Whether they are good employee relations is ignored.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to review two cases that challenge the legality of employee drug-testing programs. While decisions in these cases will resolve some of the troublesome issues of the right to privacy, the court will not address the most significant issue of all: Is it worth the cost?
While drug abuse itself imposes enormous costs in higher accident rates and lower productivity, broad-scale urine testing may accomplish little to reduce these costs. Experience thus far indicates that the drug most frequently turning up in positive urine tests is marijuana. This simply reflects the fact that marijuana can be detected in urine for 30 days after use, while other drugs are dissipated within 24 hours. Casual weekend users of marijuana are not the chief culprits when one totals up the costs of drug abuse to industrial productivity, but they are unquestionably the chief victims of wide-scale urine testing. But then again, industrial productivity may not be the only concern. The hidden agenda might be rooting out those throwbacks from the 1960s who were responsible for “erosion of our values and the decline in self-responsibility,” as Reagan described “the enemy” to the executive recruits for his war on drugs.
In lambasting the hypocrisy of “chemical McCarthyism,” Dr. George Lundberg, former president of the American Medical Assn., estimated that it would cost $8 billion to $10 billion a year to test every employee in the United States once a year. That’s more than we currently spend on all drug-treatment programs combined. Lundberg searched in vain for a single proper cost-benefit analysis to justify a massive investment in employee drug testing. The reason should now be apparent. This is an issue that has more to do with political posturing and making quick profits than it has to do with serious cost-benefit analysis.
