DRUGS TESTING 'A WASTE OF MONEY'

Testing employees for drug use has been described as pointless by a new
report into the practice in the US.

The special report by the American Civil Liberties Union says forcing new
employees to give urine samples has no noticeable effect on reducing
absenteeism and accidents nor increases efficiency. The union studied 10
years' of academic and government research into drugs testing, which it
says has been carried out on millions of US workers.

Ira Glasser, ACLU executive director, said yesterday: "We always believed
drug testing unimpaired workers stands the presumption of innocence on its
head and violates the most fundamental privacy rights. Now we know that
sacrificing these rights serves no legitimate business purpose."

Drug testing new employees has been increasingly adopted in the UK, but in
the US some firms also expect existing employees to pass a urine test in
order to move to other jobs.

ACLU wants companies to adopt less intrusive and more effective ways of
monitoring behaviour - impairment testing for people working in dangerous
situations, more stringent reference checking and better training of
supervisors.

Among the report's findings are that it costs $77,000 to find one drug user
by drug testing all employees. David Mickenberg, an assistant at the
Lindesmith Centre, a drug programme funded by the Soros Foundation, said:
"This report exposes the drug testing industry as not only fraudulent from
a scientific viewpoint but also in terms of economic cost." The centre
helped fund the ACLU report.

The report, Drug Testing: A Bad Investment, also cricitised studies which
claimed drug users were costing businesses up to $100bn a year. It said
such reports were not based on real productivity data and that the moderate
use of drugs during off-duty hours was no more likely to compromise
workplace safety than drinking alcohol.