NO CAKE FOR YOU

As If Our Working Lives Weren't Fraught Enough Already...

YOU CAN FIND SCORES OF RECIPES for poppy-seed cake on the Internet. "Take
three-quarters of a cup of poppy seeds..." is how many of them will begin
before adding their favourite flavourings of lemon or orange, or even coffee.

Sounds tempting, but there are lots of people--many of them Americans--who
definitely won't want to indulge. That's because they know that if you eat
too many poppy seeds, a random drug test can show up a false positive for
morphine. And with drug testing in the workplace becoming ever more common,
that's just too embarrassing a risk to take, even if you might later be
able to talk your way out of it.

It sounds crazy that there are people who can't even eat a poppy-seed cake
or bagel without worrying about being pilloried as a user. But such is the
sensitivity of assays spun off from advances in molecular immunology that
drugs, or things that look like them, can be picked up at incredibly low
levels, days or weeks after they might have been taken. And the technology
is growing ever more sophisticated: today a urine sample, tomorrow a single
hair or the sweat from your palm will be enough.

The drug-testing business is booming in the US as more and more companies
are drawn into testing for a "drug-free workplace" by government
incentives. And the boom is now spreading to the UK (see "The prying game",
p 18). The big question is, does workplace drug testing actually achieve
anything?

Obviously with airline pilots, nuclear power plant operators, train drivers
or the police, there is a strong case to made for prohibiting the use of
all drugs, including alcohol. But in the average workplace, the situation
is far less clear. Drug testing, with a significant rate of false
positives, can create a climate of fear and loss of morale. And
drug-testing programmes are very expensive with the sample having to be
guarded as carefully as if it was part of a murder trial.

No contest: murder is harmful. But there is no clear evidence that people
who might occasionally smoke cannabis (the most common substance picked up
in testing given that alcohol is not usually considered a drug) are
generally less effective at work. And the last thing that any user of more
serious drugs needs is to suddenly lose his or her job and the one route
back to a normal life.

If a company needs a rational policy to increase productivity, rather than
advance moral outrage, it would surely be better off measuring productivity
directly and dealing with it, than measuring drug use just because
monoclonal antibodies have made it possible. Unfortunately, this is one
case where the lure of a highly sensitive new technology far outweighs the
value of its use. Let us not encourage workplace drug testing until we have
some idea of what--if any--overall good it can do society.

And let us eat poppy cake without losing any sleep.