DRUG TESTING THREATENS OUR LIBERTY

Until I tried my first federal drug crime case, I had never seen an
illegal drug up close. I could not have differentiated between
marijuana and tea leaves. I am not embarrassed by the naivete on this
issue. I simply have no inclination to venture into the subculture of
drugs it never even occurred to me.

As a drug na?ve citizen, I still find the trend towards mandatory,
random drug testing in the workplace to be disturbing. Random drug
tests mean just that. The workforce is targeted at random in the
workplace and tested for controlled substances through urinalysis.
The drug user and the drug na?ve are all caught in the same net.

The famous English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, opined that the
power to regulate conduct should be used in such a manner as to
create as little pointless imposition on personal liberty as
possible. Nothing is more invasive of personal liberty than forcing
all employees even those who have given no reason to suspect them
of drug use to submit to random tests. All of us should be
concerned by yet another imposition on our liberty.

Looking behind the justifications for testing, it appears that our
medical community has latched onto a great money-making scheme by
creating a furor over testing, but what does random testing achieve?
As it is random there is no guarantee that the hard-core user will be
caught. If you test three people out of 100, none of whom are users,
and you leave the hard-core user on the job, then you have just
achieved nothing more than filling the coffers of already rich
medical organizations who conduct the tests. The workplace is not
safer. The user is still there and is still a danger.

What is it with the use of illegal drugs that makes them so special?
They are so special because selling testing to the public is easy to
rationalize. Why not test for alcohol consumption? Let's have a
breath test station at the door of every workplace to test for
alcohol. After all, alcohol kills too. The difference is that alcohol
consumption is legal and drugs are not. Little argument will exist
for invading the person of an employee for a urine test for something
that is illegal, but employees and employers may balk at testing for
alcohol use.

Why not body fat tests? Body fat is dangerous. Obesity causes heart
attacks, increased medical premiums, lost productivity. However, once
again, food is not illegal and neither is being fat.

In the end the medical community has found a tremendous source of
income that produces little or no guarantee, namely performing
medical tests on healthy people under the guise of workplace safety
and liability.

But why not test for drugs when they are illegal? If you do not use
then you should not be concerned. Shouldn't we all do our part to
detect illegal drug use? Maybe, but we should also be concerned when
our government allows employers to step into a pseudo law enforcement
role. Catching criminals is a police function. We would not let the
government perform such invasions of privacy without proper
justification and we should not allow our employers to do so either.

As individuals we have a certain level of liberty that is inherent in
our natural rights as individuals. We should not falter in our
defense of those rights and certainly should not surrender them
lightly. We should fear the day that we simply submit to impositions
on liberty by accepting the assurances of those who can profit from
those impositions.