THIS IS YOUR GOVERNMENT ON DRUGS

The Tory Plan To Test Welfare Recipients For Drugs Is An Unworkable Waste
Of Public Money

Jeff Ostofsky spent three years of his life peeing into a bottle on
command. He did this two or three times a week, usually in front of an
observer, to prove he wasn't using illegal drugs. A positive test would
have kicked Ostofsky, a former roadie turned heroin addict, out of drug
treatment. "At the time," says Ostofsky, "I looked at drug testing as the
price to pay for taking methadone," the synthetic opiate drug he was
prescribed to wean him off smack.

Ostofsky, who hasn't suffered a relapse since starting methadone treatment
six years ago, no longer has to endure the indignity of pee tests. He's
still on methadone but now counsels people with drug problems at Methadone
Works, a division of the Works, a city-run downtown needle-exchange. He has
a job and he's off heroin, but Ostofsky still gets angry when he thinks
about those three years. The urine tests were "used as a bludgeon," he says.

Now the provincial government is planning its own drug test bludgeon as
part of its promise to slash welfare benefits for addicts who can't prove
they're clean. The plan, outlined in campaign documents and the Throne
Speech of Oct. 21, includes providing addicts with "the drug treatment they
require to break free from welfare." To achieve this end, the Tories
propose to test welfare recipients for drug use and provide mandatory rehab
for those who test positive.

Ostofsky thinks it's "an insidious idea." His opinion is shared by an array
of politicians, addiction specialists and civil libertarians. These critics
say mass testing of welfare recipients would be expensive, unfair and a
gross invasion of privacy. They worry the Tories won't adequately fund the
kind of treatment network that should complement any testing regime. And
they're concerned about the impact of false-positive tests. Also, since
drug tests detect marijuana more readily than cocaine or opiates like
heroin, it looks as if the Tory test regime would penalize occasional
tokers more harshly than hard drug addicts. This August, in a speech to the
Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Toronto, Premier
Mike Harris explained the rationale behind mandatory drug testing and
treatment. "People on welfare can't get off welfare and hold down jobs if
they're on drugs," he said.

True enough: it's hard to gain decent employment when your life is centred
on finding, buying and using drugs.

A 1997 study by the Addiction Research Foundation (now part of the Centre
for Addiction and Mental Health) of 114 Toronto opiate users found a little
over half had engaged in "some sort of paid work in the past 12 months."
That said, eight out of 10 were unemployed at the time of their interview.
Of the 17 per cent who actually had jobs, only a third worked full-time.

No comparable employment stats have been tabulated for the roughly one in a
hundred Torontonians who use crack cocaine, though it's probably safe to
say job prospects aren't too good among hardcore users.

Making addicts job-ready isn't going to come cheap. If only to avoid
lawsuits from welfare recipients who took the wrong cold medications, the
government will have to spend a lot of cash to set up its testing regime.

Any testing program will undoubtedly concentrate on urine. While drug tests
can be performed on hair and saliva, urine is "historically the medium of
choice" for testing, says Dr. John Wells, manager of the human drug testing
department at Maxxam Analytics.

The largest company of its kind in Canada, Maxxam processes up to 700 urine
samples a day and is one of only three Canadian labs certified by the U.S.
Department of Transportation. According to Wells and other drug test
experts, that department's regulations set the gold standard, as it were,
for drug testing. "We've been batting 100 per cent from the DoT in
certification," boasts Wells.

COSTS THAT ADD UP

Under the DoT's regulations -- which now apply to all Canadian truckers who
cross the border -- workers are tested twice. First there's a screening
test. If that picks up positive results for banned drugs, there's a
confirmation test. Maxxam charges about $20 for a basic screening and
confirmation test, provided the tests are conducted for a company in which
a low number of positive results are expected. If a client wants to test
for a large array of illegal substances and expects a high number of
positives, the price can climb to $35 or even $85, says Wells. Added to any
test is a $25 fee for the company that physically collects the sample and
transports it to a lab.

The CAMH heroin study estimates there's roughly 15,000 opiate addicts in
Toronto alone. Testing 1,000 of them would cost anywhere from $45,000 to
$110,000. And that's just for starters. "The actual testing process is not
that expensive," says Wells. "What is expensive is the infrastructure. The
company has to decide what to do when the test is positive."

Companies that follow DoT regulations generally send samples to Medical
Review Officers for further analysis. Dr. Barry Kurtzer is a certified MRO
and principal owner of Healthstar, a medical agency that serves as a
third-party administrator between testing labs and companies. Part of his
job is determining whether a positive drug test was caused by a legitimate
medical prescription -- some cold medicines, for example, have been known
to cause positive readings for amphetamines.

Kurtzer also has to determine whether a non-pharmaceutical substance
triggered a positive reading: poppy seed bagels can cause positive readings
for morphine while non-intoxicating hemp oil can trigger a reading for pot.

The cost of private drug-testing is hard to calculate, but a report issued
this September by the American Civil Liberties Union pegs the total cost of
weeding one drug user from the workforce at US$77,000.

A CAMH study conducted in 1993 determined that only 4 per cent of Ontario
firms employing over 50 people used drug testing programs. Most of those
that test are in the transportation sector, says Dr. Scott Macdonald, who
conducted the survey.

Thanks in part to DoT rules, Macdonald thinks testing among Ontario firms
has increased to maybe 6 per cent of the province's bigger firms.

Private sector testing is more common in the U.S., where an estimated 196
of Fortune 200 companies conduct drug tests on their employers.

"In the U.S., the emphasis has been towards enforcement and punishing
[drug] offenders," says Macdonald. "In Canada, the main emphasis of policy
has been prevention and treatment. Companies have generally not accepted
the idea of doing tests just to catch people doing drugs." Nor have human
rights tribunals. In 1998, the Ontario Divisional Court upheld a decision
by the Ontario Human Rights Commission that struck down a drug testing
policy at Imperial Oil. A Toronto-Dominion Bank drug testing policy was
also disallowed following a lengthy court fight.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which was involved in the cases
against TD Bank and Imperial Oil, will launch a lawsuit if the Tories
proceed with their testing initiative, according to CCLA general counsel
Alan Borovoy.

"At a time when virtually all jurisprudence in Canada has been against this
kind of testing in the workplace, the Ontario government comes in like a
raging Neanderthal," says Borovoy. He describes drug testing welfare
recipients as "a gratuitous encroachment on the privacy and dignity of the
most vulnerable people in society."

Even if the CCLA doesn't challenge the drug testing plan, the Ontario Human
Rights Commission might. Keith Norton, a former PC cabinet minister and
current Human Rights Commissioner for the province, has warned that the
drug testing plan might be discriminatory. In the Imperial Oil case, the
Ontario Court decided that drug or alcohol addiction constituted a
handicap. According to this logic, weeding out drug users via tests amounts
to discrimination. Norton has stated that the government's test plan rests
on shaky constitutional ground and could be open to a challenge under the
Canadian Charter of Rights.

The PCs would be wise to take such legal threats seriously. On Nov. 10, a
U.S. federal judge temporarily blocked a Detroit-based drug test program
for welfare recipients following a challenge by the American Civil
Liberties Union. The ACLU argued, and the judge agreed, that testing people
on social assistance without suspicion was an unconstitutional violation of
search and seizure provisions. If the judge's decision is upheld,
Michigan's first-in-the-nation drug test program will be scrapped, having
lasted a grand total of two months.

The ACLU has been advancing its anti-drug testing agenda on another front.
Its report, Drug Testing: A Bad Investment, blasts common assumptions
behind conducting tests in the workplace. The report claims that "moderate
use of illicit drugs by workers during off-duty hours is no more likely to
compromise workplace safety than moderate off-duty alcohol use."

The ACLU report also cites a study of Silicon Valley firms that found drug
testing decreased productivity by frightening off potential employees and
dampening morale among staff.

A REAL STEP UP

Unlike well-paid Silicon Valley workers, however, welfare recipients are a
scorned minority whose salaries are footed by the state.

"If welfare money is being used to buy drugs, the question is, do
[taxpayers] have a legitimate beef?" asks Dr. John Wells. Many would say yes.

However, drug testing alone will be pointless without treatment programs.
Ostofsky complains that he has clients who can't get into in-patient
treatment right now. He wonders what will happen if the government starts
forcing new patients into treatment without expanding funding for rehab.
Nor does testing alone address the kind of ancillary problems associated
with extreme addiction cases. As Ostofsky points out, welfare dependency is
the least of some addicts' worries.

Homelessness and mental illness are rife among hardcore users. "For some of
our people, it would be a step up just to be on welfare," says Ostofsky.

TESTS TARGET POT OVER HARDER STUFF

George Smitherman is Liberal MPP for Toronto Centre-Rosedale, a riding with
a widespread crack cocaine problem. He's concerned that a drug testing plan
will fail to recognize that "not all drugs are equal." Getting crackheads
into treatment might be a fine idea, but Smitherman worries that occasional
pot smokers will be the ones who get nailed. That's because cannabis --
surely the least harmful of illegal drugs -- can be detected in the body
much longer after use than more dangerous substances. Cocaine and heroin
are flushed from a user's system "within days," according to Dr. Kurtzer.
But THC (which gives cannabis its psychoactive kick) lingers in people's
bodies much longer. "It's not uncommon to test positive four to six weeks
after consuming THC," says Dr. Kurtzer. As Ostofsky says, this could lead
to a system in which hard-drug addicts on social assistance "don't use for
48 hours and pass" drug tests while infrequent marijuana users fail. -- NH