EMPLOYMENT DRUG TEST RESULTS OFTEN CHALLENGED

Three days after landing his dream job at a Durham, N.C., technology
company, Davey Burroughs was escorted off its property in disgrace. A
drug test, the kind now used by 67 percent of large U.S. companies to
screen employees, had revealed traces of cocaine in his urine.
Burroughs, 35, was shocked. ''I told them it's not possible, because
I'm not a user,'' he said.

''But the doctor said there was no way it could show a false
positive, and that I must have either smoked or inhaled it. It was an
absolute horror.'' Most drug tests in American work places are
uneventful, a routine matter for workers and their employers.

But more employees such as Burroughs are challenging the results of
drug tests, insisting that errors and sloppy practices in the largely
unregulated drug-testing industry are costing them their jobs.

Determined to clear his name, Burroughs bought a test kit at a
pharmacy and took it to the Durham clinic that had tested him.
Concentra, the health-care company that owns the clinic, agreed to
conduct a second test - this time on a hair follicle. It came back
negative.

Two weeks after he was fired, Burroughs was reinstated as a
technician at ExceLight Communications, vindicated with back pay and
- - he said - an apology from his boss. Bill Clark, human-resource
manager for the fiber-optic cable company, said the company took
Burroughs' work history into consideration when it decided to give
him the job back.

Burroughs had been an ExceLight employee for several years and then
worked as a temporary worker while in school before he was re-hired
earlier this summer. He had no known history of drug abuse.

Only 4.5 percent of tests conducted at large U.S. corporations come
back positive today, down from more than 18 percent in the late
1980s, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The agency claims the decline shows the success of corporate
anti-drug policies.

But it also should be noted today's workers are more likely to fight
back if a drug test comes back positive. Last month, a jury awarded a
dismissed Delta Air Lines flight attendant in Oregon $400,000 in
damages after a laboratory incorrectly reported that she had cheated
on a drug test.

Revelations of practices at the lab, which surfaced before the trial
began, prompted the federal government last fall to launch an
investigation into 56 laboratories that validate drug tests on 1.7
million federal employees and 8.3 million workers at airlines,
trucking firms and other companies regulated by the government. The
audit of 13 million specimens found 300 test results that were
incorrect and had to be reversed.

''There is a human factor, and wherever humans are involved, mistakes
can happen,'' said Travis Payne, an employment lawyer who advises
police officers, firefighters and other public-sector employees about
drug testing.

He tells clients who are called in to submit urine samples to
immediately go out and pay for a separate test. That way, they have a
better chance at challenging their dismissal in case a test shows a
false positive for drugs.

But workers in the private sector are far less protected by law or by practice.

Concentra, which used a separate lab that it owns in Memphis, Tenn.,
to validate Burroughs' drug test last month, stands by its results,
claiming two different readings does not necessarily mean either was
wrong.. The two tests cover different time periods; it's possible, at
least in theory, that a hair test wouldn't show recent drug use.

''We're extremely careful in our collections and certainly at the
lab,'' said John Berry of the Dallas health-care company. ''I'm very
confident the testing was done correctly.'' But he also acknowledged
that once in a while, a case will raise questions.

''A lot of time, people say that they haven't taken drugs and then
they just quietly go away,'' Berry said. ''And then occasionally you
see someone fight it hard, and it kind of makes you wonder.''

Although drug tests are an accepted practice at many workplaces
today, some employees nonetheless view them as an invasion of privacy.

''From a civil liberties standpoint, it always seemed questionable to
test people for drugs that aren't affecting their work performance,''
said Dr. Cynthia Kuhn, a professor of pharmacology at Duke University
Medical School and co-author of ''Buzzed: The Straight Facts About
the Most Used and Abused Drugs From Alcohol to Ecstasy'' (W.W.
Norton, 1998, $14.95).

''Although drugs are illegal and it means a person may have a serious
life problem, if (they) smoke crack on a Saturday, there's no reason
to think they couldn't do their work Monday,'' she said.

Some use such arguments to peddle products that help rebellious
employees beat the system.

Today you can order clean urine, detoxification tablets and much more
over the Internet. Web sites such as PassYourDrugTest.com --
http://passyourdrugtest.com/ -- and AlwaysPassADrugTest.com --
http://alwayspassadrugtest.com/ -- offer products they promise will
help drug-using workers escape detection.

Kuhn said the availability of such products might have contributed to
the drop in positive test results. But she also said that a good
analysis of drug tests will detect attempts to tamper with a sample.

Pam Sherry, a spokeswoman for Laboratory Corporation of America, one
of the largest drug-testing labs in the country, said her company
finds a small number of samples every year that have been tampered
with. There are also cases in which the drug tests can't be analyzed,
for instance if a patient drank large amounts of water before being
tested and the urine became too diluted, she said.