TESTING THE DRUG TESTERS

Faulty Test Results Prove Need For Worker Safeguards.

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 this 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
precision 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
drug-abusing workers subject to testing advice on ways to mask the presence
of drugs.

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 ensure 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 mistakes have
been made.