|
Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
|
|
US CA: Editorial: Testing The Drug Testers
Fresno Bee, The (CA) Thursday 28 Dec 2000 Faulty Test Results Prove Need For Worker Safeguards. Under federal law, transportation workers in sensitive safety-related jobs - -- truck and bus drivers, airline pilots, flight attendants, ship captains and train crews -- are subject to periodic drug tests. If the workers test positive for one of five illegal substances ( cocaine, heroin, PCP, amphetamines or marijuana ), they can be fired. In fairness, workers are entitled to an appeal and a retest of their specimen at a new lab. But until this week, appeals and retests have not been available to transportation workers when evidence showed the bodily fluid sample they provided for testing, usually urine, had been tampered with. That could happen when the sample was diluted, or a substance added to mask the presence of illegal drugs, or another person's specimen was substituted. These "validity tests" are optional now under federal law but many transportation companies use them, and the federal government is seeking to make validity testing mandatory as early as next year. After validity tests indicated that their specimens had been adulterated, four flight attendants and a pilot were fired last year by Delta Airlines. The workers disputed the results and this year, Delta reinstated them because the drug-testing lab the airline used was found to have violated federal testing procedures and then lied about it. In the wake of that incident, the government inspected 66 labs across the country that perform validity tests. As a result of those reviews, the laboratories were ordered to throw out the results of faulty validity tests for 250 to 300 workers. Also last week, U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater announced new rules, extending appeal rights and the option for retest to workers who flunk validity tests. That is both fair and necessary but may not go far enough. According to critics of testing procedures, false signs of tampering can show up for a number of innocent reasons. If a worker falls below a certain weight, suffers from kidney disease or even drinks lots of water before a sample is taken, the testing results may be skewed. Further, they complain that the validity retesting proposed by the Department of Transportation is merely new screening, not the more precision testing that would be required if a worker tested positive for drugs. Validity testing is essential. According to Department of Transportation officials, in 1999, some 18,000 urine samples taken from workers in sensitive safety-related transportation jobs or applicants for those jobs showed signs of adulteration. The Internet is full of Web sites that offer drug-abusing workers subject to testing advice on ways to mask the presence of drugs. Still, validity tests are not foolproof. The 250 to 300 faulty tests ordered thrown out by the government recently prove that. Inaccurate testing can cost an innocent person his livelihood. The government ought to take reasonable steps to ensure that airline pilots, truck drivers, train engineers and others in safety-related transportation jobs are drug free. At the same time, those workers deserve a testing system that is as accurate as possible, and the right to appeal when they think mistakes have been made.
After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back.
|
This page was created by the Cannabis Campaigners' Guide.
Feel free to link to this page!