DRUG TESTERS NEED TO BE TESTED

Under federal law, transportation workers in sensitive safety-related jobs
- -- truck and bus drivers, airline pilots, flight attendants, ship captains
and train crews -- are subject to periodic drug tests. If the workers test
positive for one of five illegal substances (cocaine, heroin, PCP,
amphetamines or marijuana), they can be fired. In fairness, workers are
entitled to an appeal and a retest of their specimen at a new lab.

But until last week, appeals and retests have not been available to
transportation workers when evidence showed the bodily fluid sample they
provided for testing, usually urine, had been tampered with. That could
happen when the sample was diluted, or a substance added to mask the
presence of illegal drugs or another person's specimen was substituted.
These "validity tests" are optional now under federal law but many
transportation companies use them, and the federal government is seeking to
make validity testing mandatory as early as next year.

After validity tests indicated that their specimens had been adulterated,
four flight attendants and a pilot were fired last year by Delta Airlines.
The workers disputed the results and this year, Delta reinstated them
because the drug-testing lab the airline used was found to have violated
federal testing procedures and then lied about it.

In the wake of that incident, the government inspected 66 labs across the
country that perform validity tests. As a result of those reviews, the
laboratories were ordered to throw out the results of faulty validity tests
for 250 to 300 workers.

Also last week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater announced new
rules, extending appeal rights and the option for retest to workers who
flunk validity tests. That is both fair and necessary, but may not go far
enough.

According to critics of testing procedures, false signs of tampering can
show up for a number of innocent reasons. If a worker falls below a certain
weight, suffers from kidney disease or even drinks lots of water before a
sample is taken, the testing results may be skewed. Further, they complain
that the validity retesting proposed by the Department of Transportation is
merely new screening, not the more precise testing that would be required
if a worker tested positive for drugs.

Validity testing is essential. According to Department of Transportation
officials, in 1999, some 18,000 urine samples taken from workers in
sensitive safety-related transportation jobs, or applicants for those jobs,
showed signs of adulteration. The Internet is full of Web sites that offer
advice on ways to mask the presence of drugs to substance-abusing workers
who are subject to testing.

Still, validity tests are not foolproof. The 250 to 300 faulty tests
ordered thrown out by the government recently prove that. Inaccurate
testing can cost an innocent person his livelihood.

The government ought to take reasonable steps to insure that airline
pilots, truck drivers, train engineers and others in safety-related
transportation jobs are drug free. At the same time, those workers deserve
a testing system that is as accurate as possible, and the right to appeal
when they think a mistake has been made.