Drug Testing

In 1998 researchers at Le Moyne University estimated (see note 14) that each year one billion dollars was being spent to drug test twenty million American workers. Since then the market for drug tests has greatly expanded from the workplace to the home. A recent Fox News segment featuring a debate between Kris Krane Executive Director of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) and Mason Duchatschek a representative of TESTMYTEEN.com informed its viewers that last year parents spent six billion dollars on home drug testing kits.

During the broadcast Krane handled himself very well giving one of the best television performances by a drug reformer that I have ever seen. He managed to get the last word in deftly pointing out that his opponent had no medical or drug use expertise but rather was an MBA seeking only to make his business more profitable. Also, on the program Duchatschek contended that if it is properly introduced “kids should feel no more uncomfortable about taking a home drug test than parents feel when they go to take a drug test at a job or to get a job.”

For a kid who knows anything about drug testing this would, indeed, be a very high level of discomfort. Marilyn Vos Savant, reputed to be one of the world’s most intelligent persons,addressed the subject in her Parade Magazine column when Charles Feinstein a Ph.D. at Santa Clara University asked “A particularly interesting and important question today is that of testing for drugs. Suppose it is assumed that about 5% of the general population uses drugs. You employ a test that is 95% accurate, which we’ll say means that if individual is a user, the test will be positive 95% of the time, and if the individual is a nonuser, the test will be negative 95% of the time. A person is selected at random and given the test. It’s positive. What does such a result suggest? Would you conclude that the individual is highly likely to be a drug user?

She replied that “Given your conditions, once the person has tested positive, you may as well flip a coin to determine whether he or she is a drug user. The chances are only 50-50. (The assumptions, the makeup of the test group and the true accuracy of the tests themselves are additional considerations.) This is just the sort of common misunderstanding that should give great pause to those who will make the decisions about testing.”

And, as Ms Vos Savant suggests the 95% accuracy postulate may be overly generous. DRUG-TESTING-solutions.net quotes an April 1992 article which appeared in Personnel Journal as saying "Only 85 of the estimated 1,200 laboratories in the United States currently testing urine for drugs meet federal standards for accuracy, qualified lab personnel, and proper documentation and record-keeping procedures. Because private companies are not required to use certified drug testing labs, workers are being asked to put their job security in the hands of a drug test that has insufficient quality controls." Now add in the fact the overwhelming majority of parents will have no experience administering home drug tests and we can see that the potential for unjustly accused teens and their concurrent resentment, perhaps even hatred, of their parents is enormous. In addition, consider the plight of the teen that tries a particular drug and decides that he or she does not like it and will not use it again who, the next day, is greeted at the door by mom and dad with their newly purchased drug testing kit.

However, during the Fox News story the interviewer asked the SSDP spokesperson if the threat of teen drug use was not so severe that other considerations had to take a back seat. Krane replied that medical authorities like the American Academy of Pediatrics basing their judgment on studies such as one conducted by Children's Hospital Boston would answer no and were strongly against home drug testing.

In fact, drug testing is a stark admission that the negative pharmacological effects of drug use are highly exaggerated by those who benefit by keeping certain drugs illegal (see Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use). The reason urine or hair has to be tested is because generally you can’t tell who is or is not using by the way they act. People who lose their jobs or run afoul of the law because of drug use have committed status violations not behavioral ones. In his book Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State Richard Lawrence Miller correctly asserts that “If drug use typically caused employees to become unsatisfactory, drug testing would be unnecessary: an incompetent worker can be disciplined or fired regardless of drug use. The purpose of workplace drug testing is to target satisfactory employees for punishment. The purpose is to identify ordinary people who can be victimized. Urine tests fulfill the same function that the yellow star did for Jews in Nazi Germany, identifying them for ostracism because nothing about their appearance or behavior differed from that of other ordinary people.”  

Cross Posted on The Trebach Report