Drug Free Workplace in Favor

Drug Free Workplace

In Favor of a Drug-Free Workplace

Implementing and enforcing drug testing programs in the workplace is overdue and has the potential to save literally billions of dollars in lost productivity, healthcare costs, and pilferage, all contributing to workplace violence and loss. The bottom line is that if a company had choose which products it produces or which markets it sells into, it should have just as much of a right to define that its employees will be free of drugs and other substances that can cost companies literally billions of dollars. While this affects all companies globally, drug use is especially prominent in the United States, which comprises only 6% of the world's population, but participates in 60% of the world's illicit drug use (Koch, 1998). The overwhelming evidence of drugs and alcohol impairing individual performance including visual-motor coordination, inability to engage in interpersonal behavior, and a lack of perceptual ability, especially where complex tasks are concerned, is well researched and documented (Kelly, T.H., R.W. Foltin, and M.W. Fischman, 1991) (Steufert S. et al.,1992) and Nicholson, a.N. And J. Ward, eds. (1984). It is common sense to require all employees to go through a mandatory drug screen before joining a company, and it entirely the right of the company to define this as a prerequisite of employment, as defined by the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988. Numerous interpretations of the Act have been created, with nearly all of them advocating a measure of enforcement to ensure a safe workplace that doesn't have the potential of being marred with theft, violence or ineffective employee performance due to drug use (Younger, 1991).

How Pervasive Drug Abuse in the Workplace Is Despite the fact that the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988 give employers the right to conduct drug screens as a condition of employment, and in hazardous occupations complete regular screening, many employers are not completing these drug screens due to backlash from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Libertarians, and personal rights advocates that insist that drug screening is not the right of the company but that information pertaining to drug use is purely personal in nature. Clearly this is in violation of the law at the least and advocating a very dangerous practice at best. Consider the following studies and their results pertaining to the effects of drug (and for purposes of this discussion alcohol is consider a drug) use in the workplace.

From the research completed by Lewis and Cooper (1989) and also by Alleyne, Stuart, and Copes (1991) both quantify the effects of alcohol in occupation-related fatalities with the first study reporting 10.7% of all on-the-job deaths are attributable to drinking on the job, and 13.3% from the second study. With one in ten on-the-job deaths preventable through better drug screening, it appears ridiculous to argue against it. These are human lives, irreplaceable and invaluable, and incalculable in their value. In another study the effects are even more dramatic. A study completed by Observer and Maxwell (1979) discovered that alcohol abusers had twice as many accidents on the job as a comparison group of workers of the same age, sex, ethnicity, job tenure and job class.

What is shocking is that the U.S. Postal Service has had the legal right to test for drugs since President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12564 on September 15, 1986. In this order the President responded to the following statement from his cabinet regarding the pervasive use of drugs throughout the U.S. government, urging action on the issue; "provide an example of the unacceptability of drug use. The President should direct heads of all federal agencies to formulate immediately clear policy statements with implementing guidelines, including suitable drug testing, expressing the utter unacceptability of drug use by federal employees" according to the U.S. Govt. Report on Drugs (1986). A subsequent study of job applicants for the United States postal service at Boston, Massachusetts found that newly hired employees who tested positive for marijuana or cocaine had higher rates of job turnover, industrial accidents, absences, occupational injuries and disciplinary episodes during their first year of employment, also from the same report (U.S. Govt. Report on Drugs, 1986).

A study of the construction industry used questionnaires from 69 companies who responded of 405 companies (17%) selected. The workers' compensation experience rating modification factors (MODs) were noted to be lower in companies utilizing drug tests. Additionally the average injury claim rate declined after institution of drug testing according to research completed by Gerber and Yacoubian (2002). The figures for specific industries' cost per injury further underscore just how expensive it is to tolerate drug use by employees. For construction, manufacturing, and service industries the average (medical and disability) cost per injury was $4,851, $2,228, and $3,222, respectively. Given these costs, the injury risk reduction associated with the drug-free workplace program for a company with 50 employees would generate an estimated annual savings of approximately $11,600 for construction companies, $3,800 for manufacturing companies, and $11,450 for service companies. Even factoring in the costs of drug screening costs including the use of outside services, the savings are significant according to research completed by Wickizer, T,

Kopjar, B., Franklin, G. And Joesch. J (2004).

In summary, it is clear that drug testing both during employment screening and throughout an employee's duration of employment is critical to not only safeguard other employees and save on costs, but to also protect drug abusing employees from themselves and the cause they might inflect accidentally on themselves. As the statistics show a high percentage of on-the-job fatalities are directly linked to drug abuse, including alcohols.

Despite all these and many more studies, drug tests are often questioned for their reliability and validity. The following section discusses the reliability and validity of drug tests and also discusses the implications of testing on companies adopting the rights given in the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988.

Drug Testing Reliability and Validity

Whenever the debate on mandatory drug testing begins the critics to this practice point out the fact that the tests themselves are flawed at the least and blatantly unethical at the most. With the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988 giving companies the right to test for drug use and the costs of tests declining while advancing from a technological basis, the pervasiveness of tests is rapidly increasing. The questions of their reliability and validity however are becoming more prevalent than ever. The drop in the cost per drug test, the increase in technological capability both in terms of accuracy and speed of results, and the increase in the number of companies that are offering these services all have lead to a 277% increase in the number of drug tests completed between 1987 and 2007 (U.S. Congress 2007). There are in fact more Fortune 500 companies than ever before performing drug tests both for pre-employment screening and on-the-job screening as well (U.S. Congress 2007).

With many of the world's largest corporations investing heavily in drug screening, a significant proportion of the revenues gained from drug t4esting companies is being poured back into R&D to overcome the shortcomings of these tests.

A shortcoming of drug tests is the apparent open-ended interpretation of results, including the interpretive skills of technicians reading the results and attempting to extrapolate them to drug use. When drug use is flagrant it is easily caught through the many forms of drug tests, yet the slight differences in drug interactions is often open to interpretation. Although recent literature indicates there are many new refinements and modifications have been made in drug-testing technology, the complexity of drug effects is so great that many problems are still present in the interpretation of test results. The most frequent problems toxicology laboratories find are associated with defining and perfecting technologies capable of determining how much and when a drug was taken, how long after use the tests are capable of showing positive results, the causes and rates of false positives and false negatives, and the increasing sophistication of employee's methods to falsify test results and in effect cheat on them. Contributing to the confusion over interpreting results and the eventual detection of a drug is dependent on how quickly or slowly the drug is absorbed into a persons' body, the unequal distribution of the drug and its associated chemicals through a person's body, and the elimination and dissipation properties of the drugs. There are various routes of drug administration; oral drinking, e.g. alcohol), intravenous (injecting into a vein, e.g. heroin) and inhalation (smoking, e.g. marijuana; snorting, e.g. cocaine; and sniffing, e.g. glue). Drugs taken orally are usually the slowest to be absorbed (i.e. By the brain and other body organs), versus those drugs taken through veins (intravenous) and through inhalation result in the fastest absorption. What all tests show however is that once a drug does enter the bloodstream it is quickly distributed throughout all tissues of the body. What makes the interpretation of results so difficult is that the residue from the drugs shows up for varying lengths of time in the different organs of the body. What further makes interpretation of results difficult to precisely define quantify is that the amount of drug stores depends on the nature of the drug itself, the duration of the ingestion of the drug, and the composition of the tissue holding the drug and the frequency of use. The greater the incidence of drug use the more permanent the level of toxins and chemicals in tissues throughout the body, and therefore the greater the probability of catching chronic drug users in drug testing. Thea difficult part of using drug tests periodically is the longitudinally there may be peaks and valleys to the incidence of drug abuse. Companies have begun surprise inspections of their workers in the most potentially dangerous occupations including forklift workers, construction workers, airline pilots, and heavy equipment workers.

Despite these shortcomings of tests, the advances made in drug testing technologies are gradually overcoming these obstacles related to the reliability and validity of testing technologies. Specific testing technologies are more adept at capturing the traces of different drugs relative to others yet all abide by the requirements of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) according to document published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (1998) which specifically required testing technologies to capture use of the five most illegal drugs (marijuana, phencyclidine (PCP), amphetamine, cocaine and heroin). Rapid screening methods that allowed for 'mass screening' were available at that time, as were the confirmation methods for those five drugs was rapidly put into place as the result of NIDAs' work. Initial drug testing technologies were focused on urine testing in a test/retest methodology that often could only test for one of these drugs.