TESTING OF WORKERS FOR DRUGS IS WRONG

The right to be left alone is, in the words of the late Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, "The most comprehensive of rights and the right
most valued by civilized men." The right to privacy is an implicit
guarantee of the Constitution; yet it's the right most violated by
government officials and corporate America, who force millions of Americans
to submit to drug testing in order to get or keep a job.

Drug testing presumably innocent individuals as a condition of employment
is a repudiation of everything America stands for. Drug testing reverses
the presumption of innocence upon which much of our legal system is built.

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure in their
persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures. Many courts have ruled that to require a urine sample to be
analyzed is a search under the Fourth Amendment

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 90 percent of U.S.
companies with more than 1,000 workers require drug tests. Wal-Mart, the
nation's largest corporation, drug tests all of its 800,000-plus employees.

Drug tests can reveal the use of contraceptives, pregnancy, medications
used for depression, epilepsy, diabetes, insomnia, high blood pressure and
heart disease. Employers have found drug testing a simple way to look into
an individual's medical history. They can easily obtain confidential
medical information and use it to eliminate job candidates and force
employees out of their jobs.

Employers who require individuals to submit to drug testing, as a condition
of employment, are demonstrating their contempt for the U.S. Constitution,
the Bill of Rights and "We the People."

There is no place in a free country for gratuitous drug testing. It is
fundamentally anti-American.

Walter F. Wouk, Cobleskill

Wouk is director of The Thomas Paine Project, an organization dedicated to
protecting the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.