Nichols Opens Drug Testing Lab in San Diego

The Nichols Institute Substance Abuse Testing Laboratories of San Juan Capistrano is responding to increasing corporate demand for drug testing with the opening of a 17,000-square-foot facility in San Diego exclusively for business clients.

Senior Vice President Gary Hibler said the San Diego center has been screening workers and job applicants for its client companies since July.

Demand for drug testing outgrew the capabilities of the American Clinical Laboratories, another Nichols Institute-owned facility in San Diego that previously conducted screenings in that county, Hibler said.

This month’s opening of the Nichols Institute lab and its singular role exemplify the increasing acceptance of drug-testing programs by businesses.

According to a 1988 national household survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 14.5 million people ages 12 and over reported using illegal drugs. Of those, 70% had full- or part-time jobs, said Jeanne G. Trumble, chief of the workplace policy research branch of the Rockville, Md.-based institute, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The institute has developed guidelines for the testing of federal employees and set standards on how they should be tested. Since the standards were established in April, 1988, the institute has certified 37 laboratories--including the new facility--as competent to test federal workers and applicants.

The standards cover the experience and expertise of testing personnel, confidentiality and the security of testing and reporting procedures.

“Given the fact that so many drug users are in the workplace, screening provides an excellent way to identify these troubled workers,” Trumble said. “Of course, this could lead to termination, but most programs have rehabilitation programs. By catching these workers, you have a greater chance of making them productive employees again.”

Some labor unions also support testing workers suspected of using drugs--as long as companies sponsor rehabilitation programs.

“Greater accuracy and increased confidentiality made testing more palatable to unions,” said Tom Rankin, a lobbyist for the California Labor Federation, which represents all unions in the state that are affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Rankin said unions have also become more receptive to screening because it helps increase safety in the workplace and reduce worker’s compensation costs.

“But we are still opposed to blanket, across-the-board mandatory testing and random testing of workers,” he said. “Testing someone whose performance seems to be affected by drugs is understandable. But testing workers without cause is an unconstitutional invasion of an individual’s privacy.”

Hundreds of cases testing employers’ rights to conduct random drug tests are now before the courts, Trumble said.

Although permitting random testing remains controversial, there is a trend toward testing job applicants, workers who have been involved in accidents and employees who raise a “reasonable suspicion” of drug use.

“If governments encourage random testing and the courts allow it, you can easily be looking at a $200- to $300-million market in the next three to five years,” said Kenneth C. Bohringer, a senior analyst at Prudential-Bache Securities in New York.

Laboratories certified by NIDA require that urine specimens be screened using an immunoassay method, a procedure that uses antibodies to identify the presence of drugs. If a specimen tests positive, a “confirmation” is made using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS)--a procedure that unmistakably identifies a drug.

“The screening simply tells you, for example, that opiates are present in the specimen,” said Hibler of the Nichols Institute. “But the GC/MS tells you, ‘Yes, there is codeine,’ or, ‘Yes, there is morphine,’ (two types of opiates) and tells you how much was found.”

In a positive test, the results are passed on to a medical review officer--a physician with expertise in pharmacology--who reviews the test and contacts the employee to determine if perhaps a medical prescription--and not illegal drug use--could be the cause. The review officer works as an independent third party and passes on the results to the employer.

Such a process is required only when laboratories are conducting tests for federal employees. But Hibler said the federal standards have become accepted as the way of doing business in the private sector, as well.

“The accuracy of testing was a problem at first, mostly because labs were only screening, but now a second confirmation step is clearly the accepted practice,” Hibler said. “People can lose their jobs because of this. You better have a product that will stand up in court.”

Typically, the Nichols Institute lab charges $30 per screening. Confirmation of a particular drug could cost $60 more. Among NISAT’s clients are Westinghouse, the American Maritime Assn., Science Applications International, Rescue Industries and Amtrak.

The firm, founded in 1971, reported revenue of $90.7 million for fiscal 1988, up from $55.2 million in 1987.