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Drug testing is invasive, insulting, and
generally irrelevant to job performance. Why do so many companies insist on it?
"I ain't gonna pee-pee in no cup, unless
Nancy Reagan's gonna drink it up." - from the 1987 song "I Ain't Gonna Piss in
No Jar," by Mojo Nixon
In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a
drug test requirement for people seeking Customs Service positions that involved
carrying a gun, handling classified material, or participating in drug
interdiction. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, calling the testing program an
"immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use."
Scalia noted that the Customs Service policy required people to perform "an
excretory function traditionally shielded by great privacy" while a monitor
stood by, listening for "the normal sounds," after which "the excretion so
produced [would] be turned over to the Government for chemical analysis." He
deemed this "a type of search particularly destructive of privacy and offensive
to personal dignity."
Six years later, Scalia considered a case
involving much the same procedure, this time imposed on randomly selected
athletes at a public high school. Writing for the majority, he said "the privacy
interests compromised by the process of obtaining the urine sample are in our
view negligible."
Last March the Supreme Court heard a
challenge to a broader testing program at another public high school, covering
students involved in any sort of competitive extracurricular activity, including
chess, debate, band, choir, and cooking. "If your argument is good for this
case," Justice David Souter told the school district's lawyer, "then your
argument is a fortiori good for testing everyone in school." Scalia, who three
months later would join the majority opinion upholding the drug test policy, did
not seem troubled by that suggestion. "You're dealing with minors," he noted.
That factor helps explain Scalia's
apparent equanimity at the prospect of subjecting every high school student to a
ritual he had thought too degrading for customs agents. But his nonchalance also
reflects the establishment of drug testing as an enduring fact of American life.
What was once the "immolation of privacy and human dignity" is now business as
usual.
While the government has led the way, the
normalization of drug testing has occurred mainly in the private sector, where
there are no constitutional barriers to the practice. Today about half of all
U.S. employers require applicants, workers, or both to demonstrate the purity of
their bodily fluids by peeing into a cup on demand. For defenders of liberty,
this situation arouses mixed feelings.
On the one hand, freedom of contract means
that businesses should be allowed to set whatever conditions they like for
employment. People who don't want to let Home Depot or Wal-Mart sample their
urine can take their labor elsewhere. The fact that drug testing is widespread
suggests either that applicants and employees do not mind it much or that it
enhances profits enough to justify the extra cost of finding and keeping
workers, along with the direct expense of conducting the tests.
On the other hand, the profit motive is
clearly not the only factor driving the use of drug testing. Through mandates
and exhortation, the government has conscripted and enlisted employers to
enforce the drug laws, just as it has compelled them to enforce the immigration
laws. In 1989 William Bennett, then director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, cited drug testing by employers as an important element of the
government's crackdown on recreational users. "Because anyone using drugs stands
a very good chance of being discovered, with disqualification from employment as
a possible consequence," he said, "many will decide that the price of using
drugs is just too high." The Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace, a coalition
that includes companies that supply drug testing services as well as their
customers, echoes this line. "Employers and employees have a large stake and
legitimate role to play in the 'war on drugs,'" the institute argues. "A high
level of user accountability...is the key to winning the 'war on drugs.'"
Why Test?
Federal policies requiring or encouraging
drug testing by private employers include transportation regulations, conditions
attached to government contracts, and propaganda aimed at convincing companies
that good corporate citizens need to take an interest in their workers' urine.
From the government's perspective, it does not matter whether this urological
fixation is good for a company's bottom line. And given the meagerness of the
evidence that drug testing makes economic sense, it probably would be much less
popular with employers if it were purely a business practice rather than a
weapon of prohibition. If it weren't for the war on drugs, it seems likely that
employers would treat marijuana and other currently illegal intoxicants the way
they treat alcohol, which they view as a problem only when it interferes with
work.
Civilian drug testing got a big boost in
1986, when President Reagan issued an executive order declaring that "drugs will
not be tolerated in the Federal workplace." The order asserted that "the use of
illegal drugs, on or off duty," undermines productivity, health, safety, public
confidence, and national security.
In addition to drug testing based on
"reasonable suspicion" and following accidents, Reagan authorized testing
applicants for government jobs and federal employees in "sensitive positions."
Significantly, the order was based on the premise that "the Federal government,
as the largest employer in the Nation, can and should show the way towards
achieving drug-free workplaces." Two years later, Congress approved the
Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988, which demanded that all federal grant
recipients and many contractors "maintain a drug-free workplace." Although the
law did not explicitly require drug testing, in practice this was the surest way
to demonstrate compliance.
Private employers, especially big
companies with high profiles and lucrative government contracts (or hopes of
getting them), soon followed the government's lead. In its surveys of large
employers, the American Management Association found that the share with drug
testing programs increased from 21 percent in 1987 to 81 percent in 1996. A 1988
survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that drug testing was
required by 16 percent of work sites nationwide.
Four years later, according to a survey by
the statistician Tyler Hartwell and his colleagues, the share had increased to
nearly half. In the 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (the source of
the most recent nationwide data), 49 percent of respondents said their employers
required some kind of drug testing.
As many as 50 million drug tests are
performed each year in this country, generating revenue in the neighborhood of
$1.5 billion. That's in addition to the money earned by specialists, such as
consultants and medical review officers, who provide related services. Drug
testing mainly affects pot smokers, because marijuana is much more popular than
other illegal drugs and has the longest detection window. Traces of marijuana
can be detected in urine for three or more days after a single dose, so someone
who smoked a joint on Friday night could test positive on Monday morning. Daily
marijuana smokers can test positive for weeks after their last puff. Because
traces linger long after the drug's effects have worn off, a positive result
does not indicate intoxication or impairment. (See sidebar.)
The relevance of such test results to job
performance is by no means clear. But in the late 1980s and early '90s,
government propaganda and alarmist press coverage combined to persuade employers
that they could no longer rely on traditional methods for distinguishing between
good and bad workers. "When employers read in Time and Newsweek and U.S. News &
World Report that there was an epidemic of drug abuse in America, they got
scared like everyone else," says Lewis Maltby, president of the National
Workrights Institute and a leading critic of drug testing. "They didn't want
some pothead in their company causing a catastrophe and killing someone. Drug
testing was the only answer that anyone presented to them, so they took it."
Because drug testing was seen as an emergency measure, its costs and benefits
were never carefully evaluated. "Most firms are understandably rigorous about
making major investment decisions," Maltby says, "but drug testing was treated
as an exception."
My interviews with officials of companies
that do drug testing -- all members of the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace
-- tended to confirm this assessment. They all seemed to feel that drug testing
was worthwhile, but they offered little evidence to back up that impression.
Link Staffing Services, a Houston-based
temp agency, has been testing applicants since the late 1980s. "In the industry
that we are in," says Amy Maxwell, Link's marketing manager, "a lot of times we
get people with undesirable traits, and drug testing can screen them out real
quick." In addition to conducting interviews and looking at references, the
company does background checks, gives applicants a variety of aptitude tests,
and administers the Link Occupational Pre-employment Evaluation, a screening
program that "helps identify an applicant's tendency towards characteristics
such as absenteeism, theft and dishonesty, low productivity, poor attitude,
hostility, and drug use or violence." Although the drug testing requirement may
help impress Link's customers, it seems unlikely that urinalysis adds something
useful to the information from these other screening tools. Asked if drug
testing has affected accident rates or some other performance indicator, Maxwell
says, "We probably don't track that, because we have other things that
[applicants] have to pass."
Eastman Kodak, which makes photographic
supplies and equipment, tests all applicants in the U.S. but tests employees
(except for those covered by Department of Transportation regulations) only when
there's cause for suspicion of drug-related impairment. Wayne Lednar, Eastman
Kodak's corporate medical director, says safety was the company's main concern
when it started doing drug testing in the 1980s. "Our safety performance has
substantially improved in the last 10 years on a worldwide basis, not just in
the United States," Lednar says. "That improvement, however, is not one [for
which] the drug testing approach in the U.S. can be the major explanation. A
very large worldwide corporation initiative driven by line management is really
what I think has made the difference in terms of our safety performance."
David Spratt, vice president for medical
services at Crown Cork & Seal, a Philadelphia-based packaging manufacturer, says
that when the company started doing drug testing in the early 1990s, "there was
a concern that employees who used drugs were more likely to have problems in the
workplace, be either the perpetrators or the victims of more accidents or more
likely to be less productive." But like Eastman Kodak, Crown Cork & Seal does
not randomly test employees; once they're hired, workers can use drugs without
getting into trouble, as long as they do their jobs well. "What drives our
concern is work performance," Spratt says. "If there is such a thing [as]
'recreational use,' we would probably not find that out."
Asked if the company has any evidence that
drug testing has been effective, Spratt says: "That's not typically the way
these things start out. They typically start out with, 'We gotta do drug
testing, because the guy up the street is doing drug testing, and the people who
walk in and see his sign will come down and sign up with us for a job.' We're
going to get the skewed....They will be a different group who may be less than
desirable."
Margot Brown, senior director of
communications and public affairs at Motorola, which makes semiconductors, cell
phones, and two-way radios, says that when the company started doing drug
testing in 1988, "They were trying to control the quality of their products and
the safety of their work force." Asked whether the goals were accomplished, she
says: "Our productivity per employee did go up substantially....Who knows if
that was coincidental or not? Those were good years for Motorola."
Phantom Figures
As those remarks suggest, drug testing
became broadly accepted without any firm evidence that it does what it's
supposed to do: improve safety, reduce costs, and boost productivity. "Despite
beliefs to the contrary," concluded a comprehensive 1994 review of the
scientific literature by the National Academy of Sciences, "the preventive
effects of drug-testing programs have never been adequately demonstrated." While
allowing for the possibility that drug testing could make sense for a particular
employer, the academy's panel of experts cautioned that little was known about
the impact of drug use on work performance. "The data obtained in worker
population studies," it said, "do not provide clear evidence of the deleterious
effects of drugs other than alcohol on safety and other job performance
indicators."
It is clear from the concessions
occasionally made by supporters of drug testing that their case remains shaky.
"Only limited information is available about the actual effects of illicit drug
use in the workplace," admits the Drug-Free America Foundation on its Web site.
"We do not have reliable data on the relative cost-effectiveness of various
types of interventions within specific industries, much less across industries.
Indeed, only a relatively few studies have attempted true cost/benefit
evaluations of actual interventions, and these studies reflect that we are in
only the very early stages of learning how to apply econometrics to these
evaluations."
Lacking solid data, advocates of drug
testing tend to rely on weak studies and bogus numbers. The Office of National
Drug Control Policy, for example, claims a 1995 study by Houston's Drug-Free
Business Initiative "demonstrated that workplace drug testing reduces injuries
and worker's compensation claims." Yet the study's authors noted that the
"findings concerning organizational performance indicators are based on numbers
of cases too small to be statistically meaningful. While they are informative
and provide basis for speculation, they are not in any way definitive or
conclusive, and should be regarded as hypotheses for future research."
Sometimes the "studies" cited by promoters
of drug testing do not even exist. Quest Diagnostics, a leading drug testing
company, asserts on its Web site that "substance abusers" are "3.6 times more
likely to be involved in on-the-job accidents" and "5 times more likely to file
a worker's compensation claim." As Queens College sociologist Lynn Zimmer has
shown, the original source of these numbers, sometimes identified as "the
Firestone Study," was a 1972 speech to Firestone Tire executives in which an
advocate of employee assistance programs compared workers with
"medical-behavioral problems" to other employees. He focused on alcoholism,
mentioning illegal drugs only in passing, and he cited no research to support
his seemingly precise figures. Another number from the Firestone speech appears
on the Web site of Roche Diagnostics, which claims "substance abusers utilize
their medical benefits 300 percent more often than do their non-using
co-workers."
Roche also tells employers that "the
federal government estimates" that "the percentage of your workforce that has a
substance abuse problem" is "about 17 percent." This claim appears to be a
distortion of survey data collected by the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH). As summarized by the American Psychiatric Association, the data indicate
that "nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population 18 years old and over will
fulfill criteria for alcohol or drug abuse in their lifetimes." By contrast,
Roche is telling employers that 17 percent of the population meets the criteria
at any given time. Furthermore, the vast majority of the drug abusers identified
by the NIMH were alcoholics, so the number does not bolster the case for
urinalysis aimed at catching illegal drug users.
According to a study published last
February in the Archives of General Psychiatry, less than 8 percent of the adult
population meets the criteria for "any substance use disorder" in a given year,
and 86 percent of those cases involve alcohol. The study, based on data from the
National Comorbidity Survey, found that 2.4 percent of respondents had a
"substance use disorder" involving a drug other than alcohol in the previous
year. So Roche's figure -- which is also cited by other companies that profit
from drug testing, such as RapidCup and eVeriTest -- appears to be off by a
factor of at least two and perhaps seven, depending upon whether "substance
abuse problem" is understood to include alcohol.
Drinking Problems -
Home Remedies To Pass A Drug Test
This ambiguity seems to be deliberate. To
magnify the size of the problem facing employers, the government and the drug
testing industry routinely conflate illegal drugs with alcohol. But it's clear
that employers are not expected to treat drinkers the way they treat illegal
drug users. Although drinking is generally not allowed on company time, few
employers do random tests to enforce that policy. In 1995, according to survey
data collected by Tyler Hartwell and his colleagues, less than 14 percent of
work sites randomly tested employees for alcohol. And while 22 percent tested
applicants for alcohol, such tests do not indicate whether someone had a drink,
say, the night before. In any case, it's a rare employer who refuses to hire
drinkers.
When it comes to illegal drugs, by
contrast, the rule is zero tolerance: Any use, light or heavy, on duty or off,
renders an applicant or worker unfit for employment. "With alcohol, the question
has always been not 'Do you consume?' but 'How much?'" notes Ted Shults,
chairman of the American Association of Medical Review Officers, which trains
and certifies physicians who specialize in drug testing. "With the illegal
drugs, it's always, 'Did you use it?'"
The double standard is especially striking
because irresponsible drinking is by far the biggest drug problem affecting the
workplace. "Alcohol is the most widely abused drug among working adults," the
U.S. Department of Labor notes. It cites an estimate from the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration that alcohol accounts for 86 percent
of the costs imposed on businesses by drug abuse.
In part, the inconsistency reflects the
belief that illegal drug users are more likely than drinkers to become addicted
and to be intoxicated on the job. There is no evidence to support either
assumption. The vast majority of pot smokers, like the vast majority of
drinkers, are occasional or moderate users. About 12 percent of the people who
use marijuana in a given year, and about 3 percent of those who have ever tried
it, report smoking it on 300 or more days in the previous year. A 1994 study
based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey estimated that 9 percent of
marijuana users have ever met the American Psychiatric Association's criteria
for "substance dependence." The comparable figure for alcohol was 15 percent.
According to the testing industry,
however, any use of an illegal drug inevitably leads to abuse. "Can employees
who use drugs be good workers?" Roche asks in one of its promotional documents.
Its answer: "Perhaps, for awhile. Then, with extended use and abuse of drugs and
alcohol, their performance begins to deteriorate. They lose their edge. They're
late for work more often or they miss work all together....Suddenly, one
person's drug problem becomes everyone's problem." This equation of use with
abuse is a staple of prohibitionist propaganda. "It is simply not true," says
the Drug-Free America Foundation, "that a drug user or alcohol abuser leaves his
habit at the factory gate or the office door." The message is that a weekend pot
smoker should be as big a worry as an employee who comes to work drunk every
day.
Employers respond to the distinctions
drawn by the government. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, for example,
alcoholics cannot be penalized or fired without evidence that their drinking is
hurting their job performance. With illegal drugs, however, any evidence of use
is sufficient grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.
A Crude Tool
A more obvious reason government policy
shapes employers' practices is that many do not want to hire people who break
the law. A positive urinalysis "proves someone has engaged in illegal behavior,"
observes drug testing consultant Michael Walsh, who headed the task force that
developed the federal government's drug testing guidelines. "All companies have
rules, and this is a way of screening out people who are not going to play by
the rules." He concedes that "you are going to rule out some people who would
have made really good employees, and you are going to let in some people who
make lousy employees."
Still, he says, "in a broad way, it's a
fairly decent screening device."
Perhaps the strongest evidence in support
of drug testing as a screening device comes from research involving postal
workers conducted in the late 1980s. A study reported in The Journal of the
American Medical Association in 1990 found that postal workers who tested
positive for marijuana when they were hired were more prone to accidents,
injuries, absences, disciplinary action, and turnover.
The differences in these rates were
relatively small, however, ranging from 55 percent to 85 percent. By contrast,
previous estimates had ranged from 200 percent for accidents to 1,500 percent
for sick leave. "The findings of this study suggest that many of the claims
cited to justify pre-employment drug screening have been exaggerated," the
researchers concluded.
Even these comparatively modest results
may be misleading. The study's methodology was criticized on several grounds,
including an accident measure that gave extra weight to mishaps that occurred
soon after hiring. A larger study of postal workers, reported the same year in
the Journal of Applied Psychology, confirmed the finding regarding absenteeism
but found no association between a positive pre-employment drug test and
accidents or injuries. On the other hand, workers who had tested positive were
more likely to be fired, although their overall turnover rate was not
significantly higher.
It's hard to know what to make of such
findings. As the National Academy of Sciences noted, "drug use may be just one
among many characteristics of a more deviant lifestyle, and associations between
use and degraded performance may be due not to drug-related impairment but to
general deviance or other factors." On average, people who use illegal drugs may
be less risk-averse or less respectful of authority, for example, although any
such tendencies could simply be artifacts of the drug laws.
In any case, pre-employment tests, the
most common kind, do not catch most drug users. Since people looking for a job
know they may have to undergo a drug test, and since the tests themselves are
announced in advance, drug users can simply abstain until after they've passed.
For light users of marijuana, the drug whose traces linger the longest, a week
or two of abstinence is probably enough.
Pot smokers short on time can use a
variety of methods to avoid testing positive, such as diluting their urine by
drinking a lot of water, substituting someone else's urine, or adulterating
their sample with masking agents. "Employers are very concerned that there's
always a way to cheat on a drug test," says Bill Current, a Florida-based drug
testing consultant. "The various validity testing methods that are available are
always one step behind the efforts of the drug test cheaters."
Generally speaking, then, drug users
applying for jobs can avoid detection without much difficulty. "The reality is
that a pre-employment drug test is an intelligence test," says Walsh. The people
who test positive are "either addicted to drugs, and can't stay away for two or
three days, or just plain stupid....Employers don't want either of those."
Alternatively, applicants who fail a drug screen may be especially reckless or
lazy. In short, it's not safe to draw conclusions about drug users in general
from the sample identified by pre-employment tests. By the same token, however,
such tests may indirectly measure characteristics of concern to employers.
The upshot of all this is something that
neither supporters nor opponents of drug testing like to admit: Even if drug use
itself has little or no impact on job performance -- perhaps because it
generally occurs outside the workplace -- pre-employment testing still might
help improve the quality of new hires. If so, however, it's a crude tool. As an
index of undesirable traits, testing positive on a drug test could be likened to
having a tattoo. Refusing to hire people with tattoos might, on balance, give a
company better employees, but not because tattoos make people less productive or
more prone to accidents.
How Much?
Maltby, president of the National
Workrights Institute, argues that such benefits are too speculative to justify
drug testing, and he believes employers are starting to realize that. "Times are
tougher than they were 15 years ago," he says. "Money is tighter, and employers
are scrutinizing all of their expenditures to see if they are really necessary.
Initially, in the late '80s or early '90s, employers looked at drug testing and
said, 'Why not?' Now employers look at drug testing like everything else and
say, 'Where's the payoff?' And if nobody sees a payoff, programs get cut -- or,
more often, cut back."
One example is Motorola, which has seen
its profits slide recently and plans to eliminate a third of its work force by
the end of the year. When Motorola started doing drug testing, the company's
communications director says, "The cost wasn't really a factor because we really
felt like it was something we should attend to at the time." But Motorola
recently scaled back its urinalysis program, which for a decade included random
testing of employees; now it tests only applicants.
Motorola's decision may be part of a
trend. The share of companies reporting drug testing programs in the American
Management Association's surveys of large employers dropped from a peak of 81
percent in 1996 to 67 percent last year. Some of that drop may reflect a new
questionnaire the organization started using in 1997. The new survey is less
focused on testing, which could have changed the mix of companies that chose to
participate. But the downward trend continued after 1997.
Once drug testing became common, it
acquired a certain inertia: Employers who didn't do it worried that they might
be at a disadvantage in attracting qualified workers or maintaining a positive
public image. Employers who did it worried that stopping would hurt their
recruitment or reputations. Yet without abandoning drug testing completely, a
company can save money by giving up random tests. Even if it keeps random tests,
it can save money by testing less frequently -- the sort of change that would
not be widely noticed.
Still, one reason drug testing endures is
that it does not cost very much, especially from the perspective of a large
employer. Eastman Kodak, which has more than 100,000 employees worldwide, pays
just $12 to $15 per test. Even considering additional expenses (such as the
medical review officer's time), and even with thousands of applicants a year,
the total cost is a drop in the bucket. Drug tests cost Cork Crown & Seal, which
has nearly 40,000 employees worldwide, $25 to $30 per applicant, for a total of
less than $100,000 a year. Motorola, which will have about 100,000 employees
after this year's cutbacks, spent something like $1 million a year when it was
doing random testing of employees -- still not a significant concern to a
corporation with billions of dollars in revenue (at least, not until profits
took a dive).
Small companies, which have always been
less inclined to do drug testing, have to pay more per test and are less able to
afford it. They also have lower profiles. "If G.M. were to be on the front page
of The Wall Street Journal, announcing that they dropped their drug testing
program, I wouldn't want to own their stock," Maltby says. He recalls a
conversation in which the president of a Fortune 500 company told him that a few
million dollars a year was a small price to pay for the reassurance that drug
testing gives stockholders.
The direct costs of drug testing are not
the whole story, however. Wayne Sanders, CEO of the paper products giant
Kimberly-Clark, has to keep shareholders in mind, but he also worries about the
message that drug testing sends to employees. In 1986, when Sanders was the
company's head of human resources, managers pressured him to start doing drug
testing, arguing that otherwise Kimberly-Clark would get all the addicts
rejected by other employers. According to The Dallas Morning News, Sanders, "who
wasn't about to pee in a bottle," thought the notion was "utter bunk." He
successfully argued that "the idea of urine testing was demeaning and completely
alien in a culture based on trust and respect."
There is some evidence that the atmosphere
created by drug testing can put employers at a disadvantage. A 1998 Working USA
study of 63 high-tech companies found that pre-employment and random drug
testing were both associated with lower productivity. The researchers,
economists at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, speculated that drug testing
programs may create a "negative work environment" that repels qualified
applicants and damages employee morale.
The Familiarity Factor
Yet survey data suggest that most
Americans have gotten used to the idea that their urine may be part of the price
they pay to get or keep a job. In the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse,
the share of employees who said they would be less likely to work for a business
that tested applicants fell from 8 percent in 1994 to 5 percent in 1997. Random
testing of employees was somewhat less popular, with 8 percent saying it would
be a negative factor in 1997, compared to 14 percent in 1994. Even among current
users of illegal drugs, only 22 percent said pre-employment testing would make a
job less appealing in 1997 (down from 30 percent in 1994), while 29 percent said
random testing would (down from 40 percent in 1994) -- which suggests how
ineffective testing is at identifying drug users.
For those who object to drug testing, the
natural tendency is to give in and take the test, on the assumption that a few
protests are not likely to change a well-established business practice. But in
jobs that require a high level of training or experience, even one person's
objection can make a difference. An executive with a global management
consulting company says he discussed his use of psychedelics with senior
management early on "because I didn't want any negative repercussions later."
When the company considered starting a drug testing program, he recalls, "I
said, 'I'm not going to subject myself to mandatory testing because I don't have
a problem. You know I don't have a problem, so testing me is not going to fly.
And I think testing a bunch of people you pay upper five figures to mid to upper
six figures is silly.'...The idea was dropped. I like to think I had some impact
on that."
A former librarian who works in sales for
a publisher of reference works says he was offered an appealing job with another
publisher but balked at taking a drug test, although he has not used illegal
drugs in years. He told the company, "I want to take this job, but I can't take
a drug test. I think it's invasive. I think it's insulting." The employer
dropped the requirement, telling him he could instead sign a statement saying
that he doesn't use illegal drugs. Although he ended up not taking the job, he
sees the experience as evidence that applicants can have more impact than they
might think. "Every single person I've talked with [about drug testing], they
don't like it, they concede," he says. "Even when they say, 'I don't have
anything to hide,' they say, 'I really don't like this, but I want the job.'"
Since it sharply reduces the cost that has
to be weighed against the uncertain benefits of drug testing, this willingness
to go along may be the most important reason, aside from the drug laws, that the
practice endures. When push comes to shove, even those who recognize the
political roots of drug testing are not inclined to take a stand. A strategic
marketer in her 20s who used a variety of drugs in college and still smokes pot
occasionally says her attitude toward drug testing has changed. "I think maybe
three years ago I would have said, 'Fuck the man. No way am I taking a drug
test. I'm standing up for my principles,'" she says. "But now I have to pay my
rent, and I have to figure out what's important to me in life: Do I want a
really nice apartment, or do I want to hold onto my principles?"
Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is the author
of a book on the morality of drug use, forthcoming in June from Tarcher/Putnam.
Home Remedies To Pass A Drug Test
Information From Always Test Clean.
How to pass a
drug test is the question more and more people are faced with each and every day. Employee
screenings are on the rise, corporations have
their own rules and
random drug testing is often the condition of employment.
If this is the major concern in your life, you have come to the
right place. ATC products will shield you from detection of
controlled substances, prescription and non-prescription preparations, as well as other
things you might not want people to know about like tobacco usage. For
More Information check out our information to
pass drug
test
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