Professor Claim that workplace drug testing is “costly and…useless”

Professor Claim that workplace drug testing is "costly and…useless"

Wednesday 16^th August 2006

Workplace drug testing programs based on saliva and urine screening are a "costly and essentially useless" method of protecting the workforce from accidents caused by impaired workers, according to a leading toxicology researcher.

Commenting on a range of announcements from leading companies about the introduction of random drug and alcohol testing regimes in recent weeks, Michael Dawson, associate professor of science at UTS, said the programs often led to more problems than they solved.

Dawson said while the relationship between blood alcohol levels and impairment was now fairly well established, testing for other drugs was "fraught with problems".

False positives, and lack of trust ruins morale

Dawsonsaid US experience with random drug testing had shown that, not only did their introduction undermine workforce morale, it generated a high level of false positives with serious legal ramifications for employers.

These false positives could be generated by minor quantities of legally prescribed or over-the-counter medications, or by something as simple as eating a slice of poppy seed cake.

The problem with drug testing, he said, was that unlike with blood alcohol levels, there was no accepted and verified relationship between sample concentration levels and impairment.

Until these relationships were tested by extensive experiments, random drug testing would be beset by problems and potentially unfair to workers, he said.

Testing for impairment is cheap and immediate

According to Dawson, who has conducted extensive research on drug and alcohol impairment, employers would be far better off focusing on testing the impairment level of their workers.

This might be as simple as the old-fashioned, but still widely-used sobriety tests (of the kind used by US police) or might focus on achieving certain tasks involving dexterity, memory or repetitive rapid movement.

Dawson said his team had developed a simple test involving keying 100 randomly generated six-figure numbers into a spreadsheet, which accurately detected impairment levels either by drugs or alcohol.

He said this kind of impairment test was virtually free, easy to administer, generally acceptable to the workforce and the results were immediately available.

Dawson said a lot of the pressure for companies to institute drug testing programs came from private laboratories, which had a strong financial interest in signing up long-term testing contracts with employers.

Source: OHS Alert