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UK: Drug tests at work would cut illicit use, doctors claim

Alan Travis

The Guardian

Wednesday 10 Jan 2001

The drug-testing of employees at work would have a big impact on cutting illicit drug use in Britain, according to the findings of a medical report to be debated at a conference on drugs today.

The report by the royal colleges of psychiatrists and physicians said that although there were complex legal and ethical issues concerning companies regularly drug-testing their staff, the technology did exist for such an idea to be a realistic proposition.

"It would provide a record of drug use over the previous three months and could, therefore, have a major impact on the prevalence of drug use in the future," the royal colleges' working party concluded in its report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The working party was chaired by the former chief medical officer for Scotland, Robert Kendall. It will present its findings at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation conference in London today.

The report also warned that the government's ambitious target to cut heroin and cocaine abuse among young people by 50% by 2008 was unlikely to be achieved without a much stronger ministerial commitment to invest in drug prevention programmes.

The report echoed the findings of the Police Foundation report into the future of the drugs laws in concluding that cannabis was almost certainly less damaging to health than tobacco or alcohol, and backing the decriminalisation of it for medical purposes. The home secretary, Jack Straw, dismissed one of the Police Foundation's main recommendations - to reclassify cannabis so that those found guilty of possession were no longer sent to prison - within hours of the report's publication last March.

Dame Ruth Runciman, one of its authors, said she was disappointed that 10 months later the government had yet to give its considered response to all its recommendations.

"Our proposals are firmly located in the common sense and undogmatic middle ground between unrealistic legislation on one side and an unwinnable war on drugs on the other. That is also the territory on which any rational debate must be conducted."

She warned that if Mr Straw's considered opinion simply echoed his early rejection then it would be no more than a cherry picking exercise which ignored the proposals to reform the drugs laws based on a more realistic "hierarchy of harm".

A Home Office spokeswoman said the official response to the Police Foundation report would be published shortly.

 

 

 

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