URINE TROUBLE
Michael Woodiwiss on
a dangerous weapon in the war against drugs
GRADUALLY more and more British people are being obliged to give samples of their urine to be tested for possible drug abuse. Shell and other companies are presenting their employees with proposals for screening. British Airways is also to introduce drug screening for new pilots as part of the initial medical examination and the armed forces are being actively courted by the manufacturers of drug-screening equipment. For over a year now British Nuclear Fuels have been screening poten- tial employees, recent recruits and appren- tices for possible drug abuse. Drug abuse may cost industry in Britain £1.4 billion — at least this is the dubious figure already frequently quoted in the press — and the Confederation of British Industry is worried. The CBI has mounted a major campaign to highlight the dangers of drugs at work. It has been warning companies about such drug-related risks as losses incurred through lateness, loss of efficiency, the need to retrain staff to replace those sacked and mistakes that could harm a company's reputation. In March the CBI recommended that com- panies take a 'positive and unfrightened approach', and many have since contacted drug-screening firms for advice on what the Americans call urinalysis. In the United States, employers have been instituting drug-testing programmes for a number of Years now, and before Britain follows further along the same road it is timely to examine the American experience.
President Reagan announced his first War on drugs in October 1982 — he promised to build more prisons, bring in the military to combat smuggling, and swamp Florida, in particular, with drug enforcement personnel. 'Drug traffickers can run,' he said, 'but they can't hide.' The army, the navy, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the prison construction firms went into action. News- paper and television commentators were full of praise for this 'tough' if expensive attack on the supply of illegal drugs. By 1984 most experts agreed that the effort had failed: 'We're just shovelling sand against the tide,' as the Los Angeles Police Chief, Daryl Gates, put it. Even in South Florida, the focus of the Reagan administration's efforts, drugs were and still are freely available. Drug dealers complain about over-supply and falling prices — not about police officials, apart from the ones they have to pay off.
Reagan's reaction to the failure of the War on Drugs (Part 1) was to announce War on Drugs (Part 2), just in time for the November 1986 mid-term elections. The administration's efforts to cut off the sup- ply of illegal drugs were to be sup- plemented by an assault on demand. Drug users, as well as traffickers, are now to be targeted and, if caught, punished. With this in mind the President has signed an executive order permitting the testing of more than a million civilian federal work- ers. If any of these workers test positive they could face dismissal. As an en- couragement Reagan himself has already had his own specimen examined by one of the machines.
The intention of this new phase of the war on drugs is to implement one of the main recommendations of the President's Commission on Organised Crime, which wound up its investigation in the spring of 1986. The commission called for a wide- spread national programme to test nearly all working Americans for illegal drug use, in effect to force workers to submit to regular observed urine-tests. The tests require supervision to prevent people bringing in someone else's clean urine.
At a news conference the chairman of the commission, Judge Irving R. Kaufman, revealed why the recommendation had been made. The commission's investiga- tion of organised crime had convinced him that 'law enforcement has been tested to the utmost. . . . But let's face it, it hasn't succeeded. So let's try something else. Let's try testing.' At the same conference the Attorney General, Edwin Meese, de- fended the plan as constitutional. Drug testing had been given an official seal of approval. The immense problem of drug- related gangsterism and corruption was to be tackled by examining people's urine.
Although the recommendation surprised many Americans the country is well on its way to the universal drug-testing panacea of some well-placed drug-control officials. The armed forces regularly test their per- sonnel, as do about one quarter of all Fortune 500 companies, including IBM and General Motors, and another 20 per cent have plans for similar programmes.
The results of these tests have often been shown to be wrong. A naval doctor, for example, almost lost his job for regularly testing positive for morphine. He fought the attempts to sack him and eventually the laboratory technicians admitted that he was only testing positive because he con- sumed poppy seed bagels every morning. Around 4,000 army employees were not so fortunate and lost their jobs or were disciplined on the basis of faulty evidence taken between April 1982 and November 1983. The Pentagon's laboratories later admitted that their samples had got hope- lessly mixed up. No one of course knows how many mistakes are not admitted.
The tests also discriminate against the least harmful drug — marijuana. Cocaine, heroin, PCP and other indisputably dangerous drugs vanish from the blood- stream in less than 48 hours, but THC, the active chemical in marijuana, remains there for weeks. Even being in the same room with one of the many millions of Americans who smoke marijuana can trig- ger false positive results on the testing machines. Marijuana might lead on to use of more dangerous drugs but equally so might alcohol and tobacco, which un- doubtedly cost industry far more than marijuana in terms of decreased productiv- ity and absence from the job. But it is marijuana, according to the Reagan admi- nistration, that is 'taking America captive'.
Not only equipment manufacturers and laboratories are making money from urine — a young Texan called Jeff Nightbyrd has shown the way for less orthodox entre- preneurs. Since the end of last year he has been selling '100 per cent pure urine', collected from Bible study groups, to people facing job-related drug tests. He also helped organise a 'urine ball' to raise money for a legal defence fund against drug-testing. The party featured a 1930s- style dance production called 'Urine the Money!' As Nightbyrd explained, 'Besides trying to make a million dollars in urine, there is an important civil liberties issue.'
The main battle against drug testing is taking place in the courts, primarily over the issue of unreasonable search and sei- zure. Last year, for example, a group of New Jersey firemen successfully sued their employers for locking them in the fire- house for a surprise urine collection. A federal court found 'harassment, coercion, government excesses . . . and intrusions in constitutional rights'. But overall the trend is still towards more urine testing.
Britain has been supinely following the American lead on drugs for a number of years, presumably on the assumption that the country with the worst drug problems can teach us something. Employers in this country are now buying the machines and implementing drug-testing programmes without fully considering their scientific validity, cost-effectiveness or their impact on morale, quite apart from the question of civil liberties. We should learn from the American experience — not copy it. Mean- while, management and workers faced with drug-testing programmes should fol- low the government's sensible advice to children offered drugs and 'Just say no' to Jar Wars.
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