A POSITIVE NIGHTMARE

Three days after landing his dream job at a Durham 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. The
35-year-old Granville County man 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 some 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. They
worry that, because some foods and medications are known to show a
positive reading for certain drugs, their results can be misread -- or
that samples are mislabeled or not measured correctly.

Determined to clear his name, Burroughs bought a test kit at a
pharmacy and brought 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' prior
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 said the decline shows the success of corporate anti-drug
policies, which have not only created safer work places but also saved
companies millions of dollars on insurance premiums.

And 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 DHHS 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.

The DHHS gave the labs where problems were found 30 days to make
corrections, beefed up inspections of the facilities, and expanded its
audit of tests that show drug use.

"There is a human factor, and wherever humans are involved, mistakes
can happen," said Travis Payne, a Raleigh employment lawyer who
advises police officers, fire fighters 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.

Concentra, which used a separate lab that it owns in Memphis, Tenn.,
to validate Burroughs' drug test last month, stands by its results.
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, vice president of risk management for the
Dallas-based 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."

Concentra, like most other drug-testing companies, said it follows
strict procedures to ensure that specimens are not contaminated or
mislabeled. The clinic that collects the sample will measure the
temperature of the urine to make sure it hasn't been substituted with
a clean sample. An employee then labels, seals and boxes the vial in
front of the person who has been tested to ensure there's no mix-up.

If drugs are found in the urine, a second and more meticulous test is
run at the lab to rule out any interference by medications or other
substances that can affect a sample, Berry said. It's then up to a
medical review officer -- a third party employed by neither the lab
nor the company -- to discuss the test results with the patient.

Burroughs said the officer he spoke with insisted that the only way he
could have tested positive for cocaine was if he carried the drug in
his system. At that point, Burroughs said, he understood ExceLight
Communications had no choice but to fire him.

"They painted a picture of me as a drug user," Burroughs said, "but I
know that was a lie."

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 Ecstacy" (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 and
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 Burlington-based 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.

"There are variety of mechanisms people use to skirt the system,"
Sherry said.

But that has not deterred companies determined to weed out drug users
from their payrolls.

Home Depot, for example, conducts random tests of current workers in
addition to screening new hires for drugs.

"It's a basic tenet of good retailing," said Don Harrison, a spokesman
for the home improvement chain. "Anytime you have a work force that's
face to face with your customers, you want the best and the brightest
out there. By doing drugs you're not helping yourself or our
customers." Such principles, along with many other workplace mandates,
can be subject to swings in the economy.

As employers competed for workers in the tight job market of the late
1990s, the percentage of firms requiring drug tests dropped, figures
from the American Management Association show. In 1996, 81 percent of
large U.S. companies tested employees for drugs. By 2000, that number
had dropped to 66 percent, only to inch up again to 67 percent this
year, the AMA found in a recent survey.

Burroughs has agreed to take another test in the next few months as
part of his reinstatement at ExceLight Communications. He has also
talked to a lawyer about filing a lawsuit against Concentra, which he
thinks overstepped its authority when it told his employer that the
test was foolproof.

"Now that this has happened to me I'll always worry," he said. "Before
I never thought it was possible that you would get a false positive
result. Now that I know it can happen, it will always be at the back
of my mind."