ARMCHAIR DRUG DETECTION

Devices Sweep Office Fixtures For Illegal Substance Traces; Viewed As
'Kind Of Sneaky'.

On a recent evening after most workers had gone home from Robert M.
Sides Inc., a music company in Williamsport, Pa., three men went
through the offices testing for the presence of drugs.

They brushed a narrow plastic tool that resembles a home-pregnancy
test across telephone receivers, computer keyboards and mouses,
calculator keys, doorknobs, armrests and a coffeepot handle. Walking
past worktables holding tools and stripped-down saxophones, they wiped
vise handles and light switches. In a bathroom, they dragged the tool
across the hot and cold fixtures of a sink.

Like forensics experts at a crime scene, the men worked quietly, while
Alysha Sides, the company's marketing director and a co-owner, stood a
few feet away. When one test came up positive for cannabis, she leaned
close to the device and frowned as she looked at a faint red line that
signaled the presence of the drug.

"This has given us a great opportunity to get a sneak peek at what's
going on," she said.

That peek represents a new twist in screening employees, a process
that has been stepped up at many companies since 9/11. While some big
employers, such as Home Depot Inc., require pre-employment drug tests
of all new employees, many businesses are reluctant to screen current
workers by requiring a urine sample -- a state of affairs that's a
perfect opportunity for Global Detection & Reporting Inc.

Pre-Employment Background Checks Increase

Based in New York, Global Detection markets the drug-wipe test used
by Robert M. Sides and more than 100 other small employers in the past
year. Since the drug wipe isn't normally used to pinpoint individual
usage, Global Detection says it is less invasive. It is also less
costly than traditional drug testing.

Global Detection says it costs employers $10 per employee for a
"general assessment" of an office, testing for the presence of five
drugs, including cannabis and cocaine. By comparison, a single
urine-screen test performed by a laboratory to determine if an
individual has recently used drugs is typically about $35.

Legal experts say workers would have little recourse against such
testing, just as they can't stop a company from accessing e-mails
written on a company computer. "Anything that's in the workplace is
fair game for a company," says Lawrence Lorber, a partner in the labor
and employment practice group in the Washington, D.C., office of New
York law firm Proskauer Rose LLP. In general, he says, corporate
drug-testing policies have almost universally held up to challenges in
court.

The drug-wipe test works by collecting minute amounts of drugs
secreted by the skin. Since trace amounts of drugs are commonly passed
on items like dollar bills, the tool is calibrated to register amounts
large enough to come from usage or direct handling. In the U.S., the
test, which is made by Securetec Contraband Detection & Identification
Inc. of Williamsport, Pa., is widely used by law-enforcement agencies,
including roughly 1,000 state and local groups, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and U.S. Customs.

Last May, Thomas B. Keller CPA, a nine-employee accounting firm in
Montoursville, Pa., had its offices tested one weekend for cannabis,
opiates, cocaine and amphetamines. Employees were told the following
week about the test, which used the Global Detection system. "They
were a little surprised," says Lori Moore, the firm's administrator.
But she adds, "We got the results we wanted." No surfaces tested
positive for drugs. She says the firm would not have conducted a drug
test that required employees to submit to individual testing.

Now the firm plans to hang a banner in its reception area, declaring
that it is a drug-free workplace. "It's something we'd be more than
happy to have our clients notice," says Ms. Moore. "We feel we have
bragging rights."

Ron Rutherford, who owns Intelisource Inc., a Cincinnati drug-testing
company, has used the Global Detection test to screen about 20
companies in the past year and believes that because of its simplicity
"it's going to take off like a rocket into space." But several
potential clients opted not to use the test due to concerns that
employees would react negatively. "Some of them view it as being kind
of sneaky," he says of companies he approached. Half of the workplaces
he did test showed the presence of drugs.

Using the test could also prove tricky for many employers who want to
zero in on workers whom they suspect of using drugs. For one thing, a
single drug-wipe test is typically used to test multiple work spaces.
In addition, even if a phone or keyboard tests positive for drugs,
testing the surface alone doesn't rule out contamination from another
person.

On the other hand, the test could be useful to detect the presence of
drugs generally. "If a company wanted to employ this to get a general
pulse check on is there drug use in the workplace, I think that could
be information that is worth putting into the mix," says Bram Boyd,
director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Drug Litigation
Policy Project. He worries however that some employers could use the
test to harass or try to get rid of certain employees. "I can't
imagine any circumstance where residue that is on a surface is used as
the basis for punishing any one person," he says.

Kevin Brodsky, president of Buchanan Brodsky Enterprises Inc., a
Sarasota, Fla., company that operates 19 car dealerships and has a
staff of about 1,000, has taken the drug-wipe test beyond testing
surfaces and now spot tests employees. Six months ago, Mr. Brodsky
suspected that an employee in the finance department at one dealership
was using cocaine, even though the employee had passed a laboratory
drug test. One day, he called the employee into his office while a
drug-testing concern tested the employee's office using the drug-wipe
test. When the employee was shown a positive reading from his office,
he confessed that he was using cocaine and that he had previously
substituted another urine sample for his own. The employee agreed to
enter a rehabilitation program, and Mr. Brodsky later rehired him as a
salesperson.

Not long after, Mr. Brodsky bought a box of drug wipes for himself.
Now he tests that employee once a week by rubbing a drug-wipe across
the employee's forehead. "It's a pretty neat technology," Mr. Brodsky
says, adding, "If I see somebody who gets in an accident or is acting
weird I can test them right there."

Officials at Robert M. Sides say the company wants to use the wipe test
in the workplace generally -- for now -- and hopes the test itself will
be a deterrent for employees. Says Ms. Sides: "Am I going to run around
and fire people? No, that's not the response." After the recent test,
she held a staff meeting to inform workers about the test and to allay
any fears that the company would use the results to target individuals.

In that recent test, the faint reading of cannabis left open the
possibility that someone who had merely passed through the offices had
left traces of the drug behind. The company plans to continue drug
testing its offices on a regular basis as it develops a policy that
could call for testing individual employees.

"We're going to cut this off at the pass," says Hugh Sides, the
company's chief executive. "We would like to be able to say that we
have a drug-free environment."