Independence Day Special: This Is Your Country on Drugs

TAINTED THINKING

Drug Tests: A Class Ritual

In mid-May, as the Bush administration kicked off yet another "war on drug
abuse in America," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer announced that
all 650 White House employees had been required to take drug tests "as a
condition of employment." The president and vice president were first in
line. Fleischer would not comment on how this often-humiliating procedure
was administered, who administered it, or how closely the president was
watched - if he was monitored, as many are, to make sure he delivered his
own warm, unadulterated urine directly from the presidential source.

Fleischer would not even tell the press whether the president had passed or
not. All results, the press secretary said, would "be treated as a private,
personnel matter."

Bush's drug test is unusual in more ways than one. As common as such tests
still are, he will likely be one of the few people in his income bracket
required to surrender his excretions on the job. Workplace drug testing,
once ubiquitous, may in the future be an indignity reserved for the poor.
The most recent trends indicate that while testing rates have dropped, in
some cases precipitously, in the white-collar world, they have dropped only
slightly in blue-collar settings, and have actually risen among the growing
proletariat of the new American economy, retail and wholesale service workers.

Athletes aside, the primary subjects of drug tests may soon be prisoners,
parolees, denizens of what was once called the working class and, if the
state of Michigan prevails in court, welfare recipients. If the Drug War,
both at home and abroad, has always been a war against the poor, its
testing brigades, long-confused and targeting hapless middle-class
professionals, have lately been sharpening their sense of mission.

Drug-testing technology has been around for decades.

The military began using it extensively in the 1970s, but it wasn't until
Ronald Reagan whipped the country into a frenzy of anti-drug hysteria that
it wormed its way into the civilian world.

In 1986, with the goal of creating "drug-free federal workplaces," Reagan
ordered government employees to begin handing over their urine.

At or around the same time, riders were added to contracts demanding that
anyone who did business with the federal government - whether they be
manufacturers, universities, or state and local governments - take steps to
create a drug-free work force.

Congress formalized this practice into law with the 1988 Drug-Free
Workplace Act. Several late-'80s Supreme Court cases confirmed the
government's right to override Fourth Amendment protections against
unreasonable searches in the name of a perceived threat to public safety.

Sharply dissenting in one such case, Justice Thurgood Marshall warned,
"History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of
urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure . . .
There is no drug exception to the Constitution."

It was the government, aided by a growing multibillion-dollar drug-testing
industry, that continued to lead the charge for testing, barraging private
employers with what the ACLU calls a "maelstrom of misinformation" about
the supposedly disastrous effects of drug use on worker productivity. Often
encouraged by states that gave breaks on workers'-compensation insurance to
companies that tested their employees, the private sector patriotically
joined the fight and took up arms against the enemy within.

By 1996 (when the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was
passed, ending welfare as we knew it and giving states the right to deny
benefits to welfare recipients if they came up positive on drug tests), the
vast majority of employers had developed a hearty appetite for workers' urine.

That year, the American Management Association found that 81 percent of
major American companies were testing employees, up from 22 percent nine
years earlier.

Submitting to drug tests had become a standard part of having a job in America.

Throughout the 1990s, though, study after study called the benefits of the
practice into doubt.

Most notably, an extensive 1996 National Academy of Sciences report found
that existing data "do not provide clear evidence of the deleterious
effects of drugs other than alcohol on safety and other job-performance
factors." Most drug users, the NAS found, are not addicts, and most do not
get high at work (though it might not hurt if they did - cocaine use on the
job, the NAS reported, appears to have "slight performance-enhancing
effects"). Flatly contradicting the puritanical assumptions underlying the
Drug War, the study concluded that "low to moderate use of any illicit drug
or alcohol is either positively associated with productivity, or simply not
related."

Other groups, notably the American Civil Liberties Union and NORML, have
been arguing for years that even if drug use did affect job performance,
drug tests wouldn't measure the effects. "Drug testing as it is constructed
today," says Alan St. Pierre of NORML, "absolutely, 100 percent does not
measure impairment." Because urinalysis only detects the presence of
metabolites, the chemical traces of previously consumed substances, and not
the substances themselves, it can, for instance, prove that you smoked a
joint on Friday evening but not that you snorted a line of coke on Monday
morning immediately before taking the test. On-the-job drug testing,
therefore, has more to do with monitoring and controlling an employee's
off-the-job life than with ensuring his or her sobriety while at work.

Even within corporate managerial circles, drug-testing dogma has been
called into question.

In 1996, after reviewing data compiled since 1987, the American Management
Association announced that "No finding of AMA's nine-year survey efforts
can confirm with statistical certainty that testing deters drug use." Two
years later, a survey of 63 high-tech firms confirmed the AMA's results,
revealing that not only had testing failed to improve worker productivity,
but that "Surprisingly, companies adopting drug-testing programs are found
to exhibit lower levels of productivity than their counterparts that do
not," by as much as 20 percent.

At some point in the late 1990s, the corporate world began listening, but
only selectively. The AMA's most recent data shows that while 74 percent of
all companies tested in 1997, 67 percent were testing by 2001. Broken down
a bit further, the results get more interesting. Drug testing in the highly
paid financial-services sector dropped by more than half, from 47 percent
in 1997 to 23 percent this year. Testing in other white-collar fields, in
what the AMA terms the "business and professional sector," dropped by more
than 20 percent. Meanwhile, manufacturing, the most highly tested category
four years ago, retained that status; testing dropped slightly, from 86
percent to 81 percent.

Only in the lowest-paid, least-skilled category - wholesale and retail
employees - did drug-testing rates jump, from 61 percent to 65 percent.

In short: White-collar workers are being tested less and less, while it's
becoming increasingly likely that waitresses and salesclerks will have to
produce a cup of urine on demand.

So Wall Street brokers can rest assured that nothing will get between their
bladders and the executive toilets, but stock boys at Vons have to hand
over a sample with their job application before performing sensitive tasks
like pricing potato chips. "It really doesn't make sense," observes Graham
Boyd of the ACLU's Drug Policy Litigation Project. The rift has been
especially deep in the tech world, where, the Los Angeles Times reported
last fall, two-tier testing programs sometimes exist within one firm.
Intuit, for example, screens the workers at its telephone-help center in
Nevada for drugs, but not those at its corporate headquarters in Silicon
Valley. Similarly, Amazon.com tests its employees at some of its outlying
distribution centers, but not at its Seattle home office.

Such disparities, as is so often the case, have largely been determined by
the market.

At the high end, skilled white-collar workers were enough in demand in the
late '90s that companies feared losing potential employees to other
employers who did not drug-test. At the low end, though, the boom years
supplied a steady pool of easily replaceable service workers.

If they didn't want to take a drug test at Wal-Mart, there was nowhere else
to go - Kmart drug-tests too. Class stereotypes equating poverty with drug
abuse (like those behind Michigan's attempt to make a clean drug test
result a precondition to receiving welfare benefits) surely also played a
role. Regardless of the causes, though, the result is the same: another
ritual of humiliation for the working poor, a clear sign from management
that your body, like your time, is not your own.

Next Article: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1192/a03.html