URINE - OR YOU'RE OUT

Drug testing is invasive, insulting, and generally irrelevant to job
performance. Why do so many companies insist on it?

"I ain't gonna pee-pee in no cup, unless Nancy Reagan's gonna drink it
up."

- -- from the 1987 song "I Ain't Gonna Piss in No Jar," by Mojo
Nixon

In 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a drug test requirement for
people seeking Customs Service positions that involved carrying a gun,
handling classified material, or participating in drug interdiction.
Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, calling the testing program an
"immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to
drug use." Scalia noted that the Customs Service policy required
people to perform "an excretory function traditionally shielded by
great privacy" while a monitor stood by, listening for "the normal
sounds," after which "the excretion so produced [would] be turned over
to the Government for chemical analysis." He deemed this "a type of
search particularly destructive of privacy and offensive to personal
dignity."

Six years later, Scalia considered a case involving much the same
procedure, this time imposed on randomly selected athletes at a public
high school.

Writing for the majority, he said "the privacy interests compromised
by the process of obtaining the urine sample are in our view
negligible."

Last March the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a broader testing
program at another public high school, covering students involved in
any sort of competitive extracurricular activity, including chess,
debate, band, choir, and cooking. "If your argument is good for this
case," Justice David Souter told the school district's lawyer, "then
your argument is a fortiori good for testing everyone in school."
Scalia, who three months later would join the majority opinion
upholding the drug test policy, did not seem troubled by that
suggestion. "You're dealing with minors," he noted.

That factor helps explain Scalia's apparent equanimity at the prospect
of subjecting every high school student to a ritual he had thought too
degrading for customs agents.

But his nonchalance also reflects the establishment of drug testing as
an enduring fact of American life. What was once the "immolation of
privacy and human dignity" is now business as usual.

While the government has led the way, the normalization of drug
testing has occurred mainly in the private sector, where there are no
constitutional barriers to the practice.

Today about half of all U.S. employers require applicants, workers, or
both to demonstrate the purity of their bodily fluids by peeing into a
cup on demand.

For defenders of liberty, this situation arouses mixed
feelings.

On the one hand, freedom of contract means that businesses should be
allowed to set whatever conditions they like for employment. People
who don't want to let Home Depot or Wal-Mart sample their urine can
take their labor elsewhere.

The fact that drug testing is widespread suggests either that
applicants and employees do not mind it much or that it enhances
profits enough to justify the extra cost of finding and keeping
workers, along with the direct expense of conducting the tests.

On the other hand, the profit motive is clearly not the only factor
driving the use of drug testing.

Through mandates and exhortation, the government has conscripted and
enlisted employers to enforce the drug laws, just as it has compelled
them to enforce the immigration laws. In 1989 William Bennett, then
director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited drug
testing by employers as an important element of the government's
crackdown on recreational users. "Because anyone using drugs stands a
very good chance of being discovered, with disqualification from
employment as a possible consequence," he said, "many will decide that
the price of using drugs is just too high." The Institute for a
Drug-Free Workplace, a coalition that includes companies that supply
drug testing services as well as their customers, echoes this line.
"Employers and employees have a large stake and legitimate role to
play in the 'war on drugs,'" the institute argues. "A high level of
user accountability...is the key to winning the 'war on drugs.'"

Why Test?

Federal policies requiring or encouraging drug testing by private
employers include transportation regulations, conditions attached to
government contracts, and propaganda aimed at convincing companies
that good corporate citizens need to take an interest in their
workers' urine.

>From the government's perspective, it does not matter whether this
urological fixation is good for a company's bottom line. And given the
meagerness of the evidence that drug testing makes economic sense, it
probably would be much less popular with employers if it were purely a
business practice rather than a weapon of prohibition. If it weren't
for the war on drugs, it seems likely that employers would treat
marijuana and other currently illegal intoxicants the way they treat
alcohol, which they view as a problem only when it interferes with
work.

Civilian drug testing got a big boost in 1986, when President Reagan
issued an executive order declaring that "drugs will not be tolerated
in the Federal workplace." The order asserted that "the use of illegal
drugs, on or off duty," undermines productivity, health, safety,
public confidence, and national security.

In addition to drug testing based on "reasonable suspicion" and
following accidents, Reagan authorized testing applicants for
government jobs and federal employees in "sensitive positions."
Significantly, the order was based on the premise that "the Federal
government, as the largest employer in the Nation, can and should show
the way towards achieving drug-free workplaces." Two years later,
Congress approved the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988, which demanded
that all federal grant recipients and many contractors "maintain a
drug-free workplace." Although the law did not explicitly require drug
testing, in practice this was the surest way to demonstrate compliance.

Private employers, especially big companies with high profiles and
lucrative government contracts (or hopes of getting them), soon
followed the government's lead. In its surveys of large employers, the
American Management Association found that the share with drug testing
programs increased from 21 percent in 1987 to 81 percent in 1996. A
1988 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that drug
testing was required by 16 percent of work sites nationwide.

Four years later, according to a survey by the statistician Tyler
Hartwell and his colleagues, the share had increased to nearly half.
In the 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (the source of the
most recent nationwide data), 49 percent of respondents said their
employers required some kind of drug testing.

As many as 50 million drug tests are performed each year in this
country, generating revenue in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion.
That's in addition to the money earned by specialists, such as
consultants and medical review officers, who provide related services.
Drug testing mainly affects pot smokers, because marijuana is much
more popular than other illegal drugs and has the longest detection
window.

Traces of marijuana can be detected in urine for three or more days
after a single dose, so someone who smoked a joint on Friday night
could test positive on Monday morning.

Daily marijuana smokers can test positive for weeks after their last
puff. Because traces linger long after the drug's effects have worn
off, a positive result does not indicate intoxication or impairment.
(See sidebar.)

The relevance of such test results to job performance is by no means
clear. But in the late 1980s and early '90s, government propaganda and
alarmist press coverage combined to persuade employers that they could
no longer rely on traditional methods for distinguishing between good
and bad workers. "When employers read in Time and Newsweek and U.S.
News & World Report that there was an epidemic of drug abuse in
America, they got scared like everyone else," says Lewis Maltby,
president of the National Workrights Institute and a leading critic of
drug testing. "They didn't want some pothead in their company causing
a catastrophe and killing someone.

Drug testing was the only answer that anyone presented to them, so
they took it." Because drug testing was seen as an emergency measure,
its costs and benefits were never carefully evaluated. "Most firms are
understandably rigorous about making major investment decisions,"
Maltby says, "but drug testing was treated as an exception."

My interviews with officials of companies that do drug testing -- all
members of the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace -- tended to
confirm this assessment. They all seemed to feel that drug testing was
worthwhile, but they offered little evidence to back up that impression.

Link Staffing Services, a Houston-based temp agency, has been testing
applicants since the late 1980s. "In the industry that we are in,"
says Amy Maxwell, Link's marketing manager, "a lot of times we get
people with undesirable traits, and drug testing can screen them out
real quick." In addition to conducting interviews and looking at
references, the company does background checks, gives applicants a
variety of aptitude tests, and administers the Link Occupational
Pre-employment Evaluation, a screening program that "helps identify an
applicant's tendency towards characteristics such as absenteeism,
theft and dishonesty, low productivity, poor attitude, hostility, and
drug use or violence." Although the drug testing requirement may help
impress Link's customers, it seems unlikely that urinalysis adds
something useful to the information from these other screening tools.
Asked if drug testing has affected accident rates or some other
performance indicator, Maxwell says, "We probably don't track that,
because we have other things that [applicants] have to pass."

Eastman Kodak, which makes photographic supplies and equipment, tests
all applicants in the U.S. but tests employees (except for those
covered by Department of Transportation regulations) only when there's
cause for suspicion of drug-related impairment. Wayne Lednar, Eastman
Kodak's corporate medical director, says safety was the company's main
concern when it started doing drug testing in the 1980s. "Our safety
performance has substantially improved in the last 10 years on a
worldwide basis, not just in the United States," Lednar says. "That
improvement, however, is not one [for which] the drug testing approach
in the U.S. can be the major explanation. A very large worldwide
corporation initiative driven by line management is really what I
think has made the difference in terms of our safety
performance."

David Spratt, vice president for medical services at Crown Cork &
Seal, a Philadelphia-based packaging manufacturer, says that when the
company started doing drug testing in the early 1990s, "there was a
concern that employees who used drugs were more likely to have
problems in the workplace, be either the perpetrators or the victims
of more accidents or more likely to be less productive." But like
Eastman Kodak, Crown Cork & Seal does not randomly test employees;
once they're hired, workers can use drugs without getting into
trouble, as long as they do their jobs well. "What drives our concern
is work performance," Spratt says. "If there is such a thing [as]
'recreational use,' we would probably not find that out."

Asked if the company has any evidence that drug testing has been
effective, Spratt says: "That's not typically the way these things
start out. They typically start out with, 'We gotta do drug testing,
because the guy up the street is doing drug testing, and the people
who walk in and see his sign will come down and sign up with us for a
job.' We're going to get the skewed....They will be a different group
who may be less than desirable."

Margot Brown, senior director of communications and public affairs at
Motorola, which makes semiconductors, cell phones, and two-way radios,
says that when the company started doing drug testing in 1988, "They
were trying to control the quality of their products and the safety of
their work force." Asked whether the goals were accomplished, she
says: "Our productivity per employee did go up substantially....Who
knows if that was coincidental or not? Those were good years for Motorola."

Phantom Figures

As those remarks suggest, drug testing became broadly accepted without
any firm evidence that it does what it's supposed to do: improve
safety, reduce costs, and boost productivity. "Despite beliefs to the
contrary," concluded a comprehensive 1994 review of the scientific
literature by the National Academy of Sciences, "the preventive
effects of drug-testing programs have never been adequately
demonstrated." While allowing for the possibility that drug testing
could make sense for a particular employer, the academy's panel of
experts cautioned that little was known about the impact of drug use
on work performance. "The data obtained in worker population studies,"
it said, "do not provide clear evidence of the deleterious effects of
drugs other than alcohol on safety and other job performance
indicators."

It is clear from the concessions occasionally made by supporters of
drug testing that their case remains shaky. "Only limited information
is available about the actual effects of illicit drug use in the
workplace," admits the Drug-Free America Foundation on its Web site.
"We do not have reliable data on the relative cost-effectiveness of
various types of interventions within specific industries, much less
across industries. Indeed, only a relatively few studies have
attempted true cost/benefit evaluations of actual interventions, and
these studies reflect that we are in only the very early stages of
learning how to apply econometrics to these evaluations."

Lacking solid data, advocates of drug testing tend to rely on weak
studies and bogus numbers.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy, for example, claims a 1995
study by Houston's Drug-Free Business Initiative "demonstrated that
workplace drug testing reduces injuries and worker's compensation
claims." Yet the study's authors noted that the "findings concerning
organizational performance indicators are based on numbers of cases
too small to be statistically meaningful. While they are informative
and provide basis for speculation, they are not in any way definitive
or conclusive, and should be regarded as hypotheses for future research."

Sometimes the "studies" cited by promoters of drug testing do not even
exist.

Quest Diagnostics, a leading drug testing company, asserts on its Web
site that "substance abusers" are "3.6 times more likely to be
involved in on-the-job accidents" and "5 times more likely to file a
worker's compensation claim." As Queens College sociologist Lynn
Zimmer has shown, the original source of these numbers, sometimes
identified as "the Firestone Study," was a 1972 speech to Firestone
Tire executives in which an advocate of employee assistance programs
compared workers with "medical-behavioral problems" to other employees.

He focused on alcoholism, mentioning illegal drugs only in passing,
and he cited no research to support his seemingly precise figures.

Another number from the Firestone speech appears on the Web site of
Roche Diagnostics, which claims "substance abusers utilize their
medical benefits 300 percent more often than do their non-using
co-workers."

Roche also tells employers that "the federal government estimates"
that "the percentage of your workforce that has a substance abuse
problem" is "about 17 percent." This claim appears to be a distortion
of survey data collected by the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH). As summarized by the American Psychiatric Association, the
data indicate that "nearly 17 percent of the U.S. population 18 years
old and over will fulfill criteria for alcohol or drug abuse in their
lifetimes." By contrast, Roche is telling employers that 17 percent of
the population meets the criteria at any given time. Furthermore, the
vast majority of the drug abusers identified by the NIMH were
alcoholics, so the number does not bolster the case for urinalysis
aimed at catching illegal drug users.

According to a study published last February in the Archives of
General Psychiatry, less than 8 percent of the adult population meets
the criteria for "any substance use disorder" in a given year, and 86
percent of those cases involve alcohol.

The study, based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey, found
that 2.4 percent of respondents had a "substance use disorder"
involving a drug other than alcohol in the previous year. So Roche's
figure -- which is also cited by other companies that profit from drug
testing, such as RapidCup and eVeriTest -- appears to be off by a
factor of at least two and perhaps seven, depending upon whether
"substance abuse problem" is understood to include alcohol.

Drinking Problems

This ambiguity seems to be deliberate. To magnify the size of the
problem facing employers, the government and the drug testing industry
routinely conflate illegal drugs with alcohol.

But it's clear that employers are not expected to treat drinkers the
way they treat illegal drug users.

Although drinking is generally not allowed on company time, few
employers do random tests to enforce that policy. In 1995, according
to survey data collected by Tyler Hartwell and his colleagues, less
than 14 percent of work sites randomly tested employees for alcohol.

And while 22 percent tested applicants for alcohol, such tests do not
indicate whether someone had a drink, say, the night before.

In any case, it's a rare employer who refuses to hire
drinkers.

When it comes to illegal drugs, by contrast, the rule is zero
tolerance: Any use, light or heavy, on duty or off, renders an
applicant or worker unfit for employment. "With alcohol, the question
has always been not 'Do you consume?' but 'How much?'" notes Ted
Shults, chairman of the American Association of Medical Review
Officers, which trains and certifies physicians who specialize in drug
testing. "With the illegal drugs, it's always, 'Did you use it?'"

The double standard is especially striking because irresponsible
drinking is by far the biggest drug problem affecting the workplace.
"Alcohol is the most widely abused drug among working adults," the
U.S. Department of Labor notes.

It cites an estimate from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration that alcohol accounts for 86 percent of the
costs imposed on businesses by drug abuse.

In part, the inconsistency reflects the belief that illegal drug users
are more likely than drinkers to become addicted and to be intoxicated
on the job. There is no evidence to support either assumption. The
vast majority of pot smokers, like the vast majority of drinkers, are
occasional or moderate users.

About 12 percent of the people who use marijuana in a given year, and
about 3 percent of those who have ever tried it, report smoking it on
300 or more days in the previous year. A 1994 study based on data from
the National Comorbidity Survey estimated that 9 percent of marijuana
users have ever met the American Psychiatric Association's criteria
for "substance dependence." The comparable figure for alcohol was 15
percent.

According to the testing industry, however, any use of an illegal drug
inevitably leads to abuse. "Can employees who use drugs be good
workers?" Roche asks in one of its promotional documents.

Its answer: "Perhaps, for awhile.

Then, with extended use and abuse of drugs and alcohol, their
performance begins to deteriorate. They lose their edge. They're late
for work more often or they miss work all together....Suddenly, one
person's drug problem becomes everyone's problem." This equation of
use with abuse is a staple of prohibitionist propaganda. "It is simply
not true," says the Drug-Free America Foundation, "that a drug user or
alcohol abuser leaves his habit at the factory gate or the office
door." The message is that a weekend pot smoker should be as big a
worry as an employee who comes to work drunk every day.

Employers respond to the distinctions drawn by the government. Under
the Americans With Disabilities Act, for example, alcoholics cannot be
penalized or fired without evidence that their drinking is hurting
their job performance. With illegal drugs, however, any evidence of
use is sufficient grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.

A Crude Tool

A more obvious reason government policy shapes employers' practices is
that many do not want to hire people who break the law. A positive
urinalysis "proves someone has engaged in illegal behavior," observes
drug testing consultant Michael Walsh, who headed the task force that
developed the federal government's drug testing guidelines. "All
companies have rules, and this is a way of screening out people who
are not going to play by the rules." He concedes that "you are going
to rule out some people who would have made really good employees, and
you are going to let in some people who make lousy employees."

Still, he says, "in a broad way, it's a fairly decent screening
device."

Perhaps the strongest evidence in support of drug testing as a
screening device comes from research involving postal workers
conducted in the late 1980s. A study reported in The Journal of the
American Medical Association in 1990 found that postal workers who
tested positive for marijuana when they were hired were more prone to
accidents, injuries, absences, disciplinary action, and turnover.

The differences in these rates were relatively small, however, ranging
from 55 percent to 85 percent.

By contrast, previous estimates had ranged from 200 percent for
accidents to 1,500 percent for sick leave. "The findings of this study
suggest that many of the claims cited to justify pre-employment drug
screening have been exaggerated," the researchers concluded.

Even these comparatively modest results may be misleading. The study's
methodology was criticized on several grounds, including an accident
measure that gave extra weight to mishaps that occurred soon after
hiring.

A larger study of postal workers, reported the same year in the
Journal of Applied Psychology, confirmed the finding regarding
absenteeism but found no association between a positive pre-employment
drug test and accidents or injuries.

On the other hand, workers who had tested positive were more likely to
be fired, although their overall turnover rate was not significantly
higher.

It's hard to know what to make of such findings.

As the National Academy of Sciences noted, "drug use may be just one
among many characteristics of a more deviant lifestyle, and
associations between use and degraded performance may be due not to
drug-related impairment but to general deviance or other factors." On
average, people who use illegal drugs may be less risk-averse or less
respectful of authority, for example, although any such tendencies
could simply be artifacts of the drug laws.

In any case, pre-employment tests, the most common kind, do not catch
most drug users.

Since people looking for a job know they may have to undergo a drug
test, and since the tests themselves are announced in advance, drug
users can simply abstain until after they've passed. For light users
of marijuana, the drug whose traces linger the longest, a week or two
of abstinence is probably enough.

Pot smokers short on time can use a variety of methods to avoid
testing positive, such as diluting their urine by drinking a lot of
water, substituting someone else's urine, or adulterating their sample
with masking agents. "Employers are very concerned that there's always
a way to cheat on a drug test," says Bill Current, a Florida-based
drug testing consultant. "The various validity testing methods that
are available are always one step behind the efforts of the drug test
cheaters."

Generally speaking, then, drug users applying for jobs can avoid
detection without much difficulty. "The reality is that a
pre-employment drug test is an intelligence test," says Walsh. The
people who test positive are "either addicted to drugs, and can't stay
away for two or three days, or just plain stupid....Employers don't
want either of those." Alternatively, applicants who fail a drug
screen may be especially reckless or lazy. In short, it's not safe to
draw conclusions about drug users in general from the sample
identified by pre-employment tests.

By the same token, however, such tests may indirectly measure
characteristics of concern to employers.

The upshot of all this is something that neither supporters nor
opponents of drug testing like to admit: Even if drug use itself has
little or no impact on job performance -- perhaps because it generally
occurs outside the workplace -- pre-employment testing still might
help improve the quality of new hires.

If so, however, it's a crude tool. As an index of undesirable traits,
testing positive on a drug test could be likened to having a tattoo.

Refusing to hire people with tattoos might, on balance, give a company
better employees, but not because tattoos make people less productive
or more prone to accidents.

How Much?

Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, argues that
such benefits are too speculative to justify drug testing, and he
believes employers are starting to realize that. "Times are tougher
than they were 15 years ago," he says. "Money is tighter, and
employers are scrutinizing all of their expenditures to see if they
are really necessary.

Initially, in the late '80s or early '90s, employers looked at drug
testing and said, 'Why not?' Now employers look at drug testing like
everything else and say, 'Where's the payoff?' And if nobody sees a
payoff, programs get cut -- or, more often, cut back."

One example is Motorola, which has seen its profits slide recently and
plans to eliminate a third of its work force by the end of the year.
When Motorola started doing drug testing, the company's communications
director says, "The cost wasn't really a factor because we really felt
like it was something we should attend to at the time." But Motorola
recently scaled back its urinalysis program, which for a decade
included random testing of employees; now it tests only applicants.

Motorola's decision may be part of a trend.

The share of companies reporting drug testing programs in the American
Management Association's surveys of large employers dropped from a
peak of 81 percent in 1996 to 67 percent last year. Some of that drop
may reflect a new questionnaire the organization started using in
1997. The new survey is less focused on testing, which could have
changed the mix of companies that chose to participate. But the
downward trend continued after 1997.

Once drug testing became common, it acquired a certain inertia:
Employers who didn't do it worried that they might be at a
disadvantage in attracting qualified workers or maintaining a positive
public image.

Employers who did it worried that stopping would hurt their
recruitment or reputations. Yet without abandoning drug testing
completely, a company can save money by giving up random tests. Even
if it keeps random tests, it can save money by testing less frequently
- -- the sort of change that would not be widely noticed.

Still, one reason drug testing endures is that it does not cost very
much, especially from the perspective of a large employer.

Eastman Kodak, which has more than 100,000 employees worldwide, pays
just $12 to $15 per test. Even considering additional expenses (such
as the medical review officer's time), and even with thousands of
applicants a year, the total cost is a drop in the bucket.

Drug tests cost Cork Crown & Seal, which has nearly 40,000 employees
worldwide, $25 to $30 per applicant, for a total of less than $100,000
a year. Motorola, which will have about 100,000 employees after this
year's cutbacks, spent something like $1 million a year when it was
doing random testing of employees -- still not a significant concern
to a corporation with billions of dollars in revenue (at least, not
until profits took a dive).

Small companies, which have always been less inclined to do drug
testing, have to pay more per test and are less able to afford it.
They also have lower profiles. "If G.M. were to be on the front page
of The Wall Street Journal, announcing that they dropped their drug
testing program, I wouldn't want to own their stock," Maltby says. He
recalls a conversation in which the president of a Fortune 500 company
told him that a few million dollars a year was a small price to pay
for the reassurance that drug testing gives stockholders.

The direct costs of drug testing are not the whole story, however.
Wayne Sanders, CEO of the paper products giant Kimberly-Clark, has to
keep shareholders in mind, but he also worries about the message that
drug testing sends to employees.

In 1986, when Sanders was the company's head of human resources,
managers pressured him to start doing drug testing, arguing that
otherwise Kimberly-Clark would get all the addicts rejected by other
employers.

According to The Dallas Morning News, Sanders, "who wasn't about to
pee in a bottle," thought the notion was "utter bunk." He successfully
argued that "the idea of urine testing was demeaning and completely
alien in a culture based on trust and respect."

There is some evidence that the atmosphere created by drug testing can
put employers at a disadvantage. A 1998 Working USA study of 63
high-tech companies found that pre-employment and random drug testing
were both associated with lower productivity. The researchers,
economists at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, speculated that drug
testing programs may create a "negative work environment" that repels
qualified applicants and damages employee morale.

The Familiarity Factor

Yet survey data suggest that most Americans have gotten used to the
idea that their urine may be part of the price they pay to get or keep
a job. In the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, the share of
employees who said they would be less likely to work for a business
that tested applicants fell from 8 percent in 1994 to 5 percent in
1997. Random testing of employees was somewhat less popular, with 8
percent saying it would be a negative factor in 1997, compared to 14
percent in 1994. Even among current users of illegal drugs, only 22
percent said pre-employment testing would make a job less appealing in
1997 (down from 30 percent in 1994), while 29 percent said random
testing would (down from 40 percent in 1994) -- which suggests how
ineffective testing is at identifying drug users.

For those who object to drug testing, the natural tendency is to give
in and take the test, on the assumption that a few protests are not
likely to change a well-established business practice.

But in jobs that require a high level of training or experience, even
one person's objection can make a difference. An executive with a
global management consulting company says he discussed his use of
psychedelics with senior management early on "because I didn't want
any negative repercussions later." When the company considered
starting a drug testing program, he recalls, "I said, 'I'm not going
to subject myself to mandatory testing because I don't have a problem.
You know I don't have a problem, so testing me is not going to fly.
And I think testing a bunch of people you pay upper five figures to
mid to upper six figures is silly.'...The idea was dropped. I like to
think I had some impact on that."

A former librarian who works in sales for a publisher of reference
works says he was offered an appealing job with another publisher but
balked at taking a drug test, although he has not used illegal drugs
in years.

He told the company, "I want to take this job, but I can't take a drug
test. I think it's invasive.

I think it's insulting." The employer dropped the requirement, telling
him he could instead sign a statement saying that he doesn't use
illegal drugs.

Although he ended up not taking the job, he sees the experience as
evidence that applicants can have more impact than they might think.
"Every single person I've talked with [about drug testing], they don't
like it, but they concede," he says. "Even when they say, 'I don't
have anything to hide,' they say, 'I really don't like this, but I
want the job.'"

Since it sharply reduces the cost that has to be weighed against the
uncertain benefits of drug testing, this willingness to go along may
be the most important reason, aside from the drug laws, that the
practice endures.

When push comes to shove, even those who recognize the political roots
of drug testing are not inclined to take a stand. A strategic marketer
in her 20s who used a variety of drugs in college and still smokes pot
occasionally says her attitude toward drug testing has changed. "I
think maybe three years ago I would have said, 'Fuck the man. No way
am I taking a drug test. I'm standing up for my principles,'" she
says. "But now I have to pay my rent, and I have to figure out what's
important to me in life: Do I want a really nice apartment, or do I
want to hold onto my principles?"

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum is the author of a book on the morality of
drug use, forthcoming in June from Tarcher/Putnam.