DRUG-TESTING HABIT BECOMES ADDICTION

School boards hot to order their teachers to tinkle for them would do
well to chill out instead. Yes, the Supreme Court just blew off a
legal challenge to one district's requirement that teaching applicants
take drug tests. But the operating sanction for public-sector or
legally mandated drug testing is still that the job must be
safety-sensitive. An appellate court's finding that teaching involves
safety concerns on some rough par with law enforcement or firefighting
seems a considerable stretch. Best to await a definitive high court
ruling.

Meantime, public and private employers alike might profitably use the
interim to study a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union
that calls the usefulness of drug testing into serious question.

Still fairly limited where the Constitution reaches, drug tests are
virtually epidemic in the private sector. Going on 50 million
employees work under one or another testing regime. Testing is a $1
billion industry that aggressively markets its programs.

Is that money well spent? Avoiding even one drug-addled employee who
might create an outsized legal liability is worth a pretty penny, but
on average and in the case of most jobs, drug testing seems a solution
in search of a problem.

Drug testing mainly catches marijuana users, but what is the point?
Only about 5 percent of Americans use marijuana with any frequency and
only a fifth of those -- 1 percent of the work force -- use it more or
less daily. Hard drug use is even rarer.

A report by the National Academy of Sciences found that illegal drugs
contribute little to work accidents and that the effects of off-duty
use are negligible, about the same as the effects of off-duty drinking.

There are embarrassing moments for testers in the research. A study of
63 high-tech companies, reported last year in the magazine Working
USA, found that productivity was 16 percent lower in firms with
pre-employment drug testing than in firms with no testing -- and 29
percent lower in firms with both pre-employment and random testing.
Whoops.

A 1991 analysis calculated that it cost the federal government $77,000
to catch each drug user. Even discounting for government inefficiency,
the price is steep to finger employees who for the most part have no
on-the-job drug problems.

There's a reasonable case for testing employees whose performance
suggests a possible drug problem and for testing the limited numbers
of workers who have substantial public-safety responsibilities.

But commercial huckstering and political pressure are forcing ever
more employees into intrusive and humiliating drug tests. A Seattle
ordinance would require tests for ushers and librarians!

Unless the Supreme Court begins enforcing its original limits firmly
and unless employers develop some sense of proportion, we'll be
reduced from a nation of free citizens to a shuffling line of suspects
with specimen cups in one hand and, for about half of us, it bears not
saying what in the other.
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The author is a national correspondent for Cox Newspapers. His e-mail
address is: teepencolumn@coxnews.com