The Destructive Uselessness of Drug Testing

Both employers and schools have found drug testing to be useless and counter-productive.  So the drug-testing fanatics are turning to that all-purpose scapegoat, a despised minority: recipients of government benefits.

Oops, I mean impoverished or unemployed recipients of government benefits. No wealthy corporate or individual recipient of taxpayer largesse need face a plastic cup.

Like everything else, the real purpose is to use tax dollars to enrich private corporations.

Isabel McDonald at The Nation:

In the decades since, drug-testing companies have marketed urine tests as a wise investment for all employers. They claim that any drug user is a less productive worker, and more likely to cause workplace accidents, show up late for work or simply quit. Such claims persist despite a 1994 review, by the National Academy of Sciences, of all the independent research published on workplace drug testing, which found little support to back up those claims.

Indeed, one study of employers in the high-tech sector found that drug testing “reduced rather than enhanced productivity.” Performance-based tests, researchers found, are far more effective at assessing a worker’s ability to perform safety-sensitive jobs than drug testing. Unlike urine tests, these tests detect drug impairment and a host of other factors (fatigue, stress, alcohol) far more likely to compromise a worker’s concentration than past marijuana use.

Nevertheless, the escalation of the drug war would prove more powerful than the evidence that undermined it, producing a powerful coalition of government and private industry players determined to convince employers of the wisdom of monitoring their workers’ bladders.

 SNIP

Over the past decade, lobbyists like Evans have focused on what a DATIA newsletter recently dubbed “the next frontier”—schoolchildren. In 2002, a representative from the influential drug-testing management firm Besinger, DuPont & Associates heralded schools as “potentially a much bigger market than the workplace.” That year, the Supreme Court upheld the right of schools to drug-test any student involved in extracurricular activities, from the football team to the chess club. (Many in the drug-testing industry advocate testing all school kids ages 12 and up, but they have failed thus far to convince the courts.)

Like Elaine Taulé, David Evans turned to his own kids for inspiration. He helped the two New Jersey high schools where his children were students to craft drug-testing policies and then set about promoting them as models for schools across the country. In a 2004 radio address, President George W. Bush singled out one of them, Hunterdon Central Regional High School, as a sterling example of “the positive results of drug testing across the country” and proposed committing $23 million of federal education funds to drug-testing high schoolers.

Studies have shown that there is no difference in levels of drug use at schools that subject students to testing and those that do not. And some drug policy experts worry that drug testing may push students away from marijuana and toward drugs such as cocaine, heroin and alcohol—those not generally detected by urine tests.

SNIP

How has the industry countered charges that its tests catch casual marijuana users more effectively than users of cocaine or heroin? By demonizing pot as particularly destructive. Despite having previously advocated decriminalizing marijuana, the first thing Robert (“Test ‘em all!”) DuPont did after leaving office in 1978 was to hold a press conference declaring that “in many ways it’s the worst drug of all the illegal drugs.” With that declaration, he broke from all expert opinion at the time, including his own. Only three years earlier, he was listed as a co-author of a white paper calling marijuana “a minor problem.”

Here's a good rule of thumb: if a corporate asshole or a freakazoid is pushing for government to spend money on something, that's all the proof you need that it's a racket to hurt people who can't defend themselves.