The Pointlessness of the Workplace Drug Test

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The Atlantic

The Pointlessness of the Workplace Drug Test

Cup-peeing and mouth-swabbing are Reagan-era relics that frequently do little more than boosting the revenues of companies that analyze samples.

Last year, U.S. workers peed into one drug testing company’s cups about 9.1 million times. And last year, as in other recent years, analysis of about 350,000 of those cups indicated drug use. Most often, the drug of choice was marijuana, followed by amphetamines and painkillers.

The data are a little patchy, but the best estimate is that about 40 percent of U.S. workers are currently subjected to drug tests during the hiring process. Intuitively, that seems like a good idea: A sober, addiction-free workforce is probably a more productive workforce and, in the cases of operating forklifts or driving 18-wheelers, a safer workforce too.

But some of this cup-peeing might be for naught (and that seems to be something that other countries recognize: Drug testing is far more widespread in the U.S. than anywhere else). In many situations, drug tests aren’t capable of revealing impairment on the job, and the cost of finding a single offending employee is high. Besides, as the country takes a more and more permissive stance toward marijuana, and as the painkillers doctors prescribe are abused more and more often, there are gray areas that arise. What role should drug testing play in the workplaces of 2015?

Contemporary workplace drug testing owes its existence to the policies of Ronald Reagan, who in 1988 signed an executive order that led to legislation requiring federal employees and some contractors to be tested. The typical American employer wasn’t required to do anything differently (and still isn’t), but some large companies took this as a cue. A new market bloomed in response. “These … policies fueled the development of a huge industry,” writes SUNY Buffalo’s Michael Frone in his book Alcohol and Illicit Drug Use in the Workforce and Workplace, “comprising drug-test manufacturers, consulting and law firms specializing in the development of drug-testing policies and procedures, and laboratories that carry out the testing.”

This industry has relied on superficially intuitive arguments for drug testing: It’ll make employees use drugs less often and it’ll ensure a more efficient workplace. But those arguments have some significant holes.

More
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/drug-testing-effectiveness/394850/


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