ACLU COMPLAINTS MORE THAN JUST SPLITTING HAIRS

For the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois to be working on behalf
of Chicago police officers is not unusual.

Over the years the ACLU has represented an extremely broad range of clients
with civil-rights claims, so it should not surprise Mayor Richard Daley,
Chicago aldermen and city police officials to find on their desks Monday a
two-page broadside mailed Friday by the organization supporting
rank-and-file officers and attacking a controversial random drug-testing
procedure that the department plans to begin using on them.

The procedure--an analysis of hair clippings--can detect illegal drug use
from about 7 to about 90 days prior to the taking of the test. Hair
analysis, pioneered in the late 1970s, has almost no overlap with
urinalysis, now used on all officers, which detects only recent drug
ingestion. And it has already resulted in a threefold increase in the
number of drug-related dismissals of police recruits, upon whom it has been
performed since last fall.

What is unusual is that the ACLU is agitating unilaterally, having not
received any requests for help from officers. Indeed, the leadership of the
Fraternal Order of Police has already OKd the city's idea to make all
officers subject to hair testing under the terms of next year's new union
contract.

But both national and local ACLU leaders say the FOP should reconsider,
that the police union and the city are putting too much faith in technology
that the ACLU charges is unregulated and prone to giving false positive
results and results that discriminate against minorities.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the National Institutes of
Health, shares some of these doubts. NIDA's leading researcher on hair
analysis, chemist Edward Cone, said Friday "the consensus of scientific
opinion is that there are still too many unanswered questions for (hair
analysis) to be used in employment-testing situations."

A Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman said the agency stands by a 1990
policy statement calling hair analysis an "unproven . . . unreliable"
procedure. A 1992 consensus opinion of the Arizona-based Society of
Forensic Toxicologists concludes that "results of hair analysis alone do
not constitute sufficient evidence of drug use for application in the
workplace," and the hair analysis expert at the U.S. naval labs reiterated
Friday he has "significant worries" about the process.

Yet at the same time, a leading analytical chemist at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, also a government agency, said hair
analysis labs "did a very good, very consistent job" detecting drugs in
recent blind checks when they were sent identical sets of contaminated and
uncontaminated samples.

One concern of skeptics is that drug residue in the air or on certain
surfaces may misleadingly show up in a non-user's hair sample. Another is
that, per the naval lab research, darker, coarser hair is more susceptible
to yielding both actual and false positive results than light, fine or
bleached hair.

And since ethnic and racial minorities in the U.S. tend to have dark hair,
the argument goes, the test will yield discriminatory results.

But another widely published expert on hair testing, criminologist Tom
Mieczkowski of the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, said such
concerns are wildly exaggerated. Mieczkowski said current research shows
that the hair preparation and analysis techniques now used by the most
experienced labs--including industry leader Psychmedics Corp. of Cambridge,
Mass., the lab Chicago uses--have nullified concerns about environmental
contaminants and pigment bias, and have demonstrated hair analysis is even
more reliable than urinalysis.

Psychmedics vice president Bill Thistle added that the 1990 FDA statement
does not apply to contemporary methods and that courts now routinely accept
hair analysis into evidence. He charged that naysayers and contrarians are
motivated by a dislike of workplace drug testing.

In the case of the ACLU, Thistle is not off the mark.

The organization's volunteer lobbying on behalf of Chicago cops is rooted
in its position that to perform random drug tests on employees who have
shown no signs of using drugs is an invasion of privacy. The ACLU prefers
specialized skill-performance testing when there is evidence of on-the-job
impairment.

But even ostensibly neutral, apolitical scientists seem to have sincere
disagreements about hair analysis. This, too, is not unusual, particularly
in an emerging technical field. These disagreements deserve a full hearing
before the city decides to make locks the key to the future of our police
officers.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski