Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 30, 1995 TAG: 9506300050
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
The findings released Thursday show companies are using better testing methods to weed out false positives. In addition, as random drug testing has increased, a greater percentage of nonabusers are tested.
Positive tests declined to 1.9 percent of workers last year, compared with 2.5 percent in 1993, the American Management Association said. Positive tests among job applicants declined to 3.8 percent, from 4.5 percent.
The survey marked the fourth time in the past five years that positive test results have declined.
It was conducted by mail in March and April among 1,151 companies that did tests on about 745,000 workers or applicants during 1994. The survey has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
``It's tempting to say there is lower drug use, but, as always in this field, things are not as simple as they seem,'' said Eric Greenberg, the association's director of management studies.
For one thing, the percentage of workers randomly tested went up last year because of new federal regulations requiring expanded tests of workers in transportation-related jobs.
``Any time you expand testing of people to include more people who are absent suspicion, you're going to drive test-positive rates down,'' Greenberg said.
This boost in testing occurred even as the percentage of companies performing drug tests of any kind remained relatively stable for three years at about 77 percent.
A more dramatic change came in how the tests were interpreted.
Seventy-six percent of the companies that did tests as of April employed a medical review officer who analyzes all findings, judges them against the worker's medical profile, then gives the results to the employer. That's up from 48 percent in April 1994.
``These medical review officers offer significant protection to employees against not only false positives, but true positives with a legitimate medical explanation,'' Greenberg said.
Many legal drugs and common foods will trigger a positive result. ``A person who eats a poppy-seed bagel for breakfast might raise a red flag for an opium derivative,'' he said.
That protection is critical, since positive tests bring swift punishment. Twenty-two percent of companies immediately dismiss those who test positive. Twenty-one percent impose suspension, probation or other disciplinary action.
Despite increased use of medical review officers, there still is cause for concern about test accuracy, Greenberg said.
Most tests are conducted on urine or blood, but in order for the results to be reliable, any positive test should be followed by a second, more rigorous test, he said.
But only 68 percent of the companies that perform the initial test also do the follow-up, probably because the tests are costly.
This failure has drawn criticism from rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes random drug tests.
``There's an enormous potential for injustice when companies don't confirm. Even the manufacturer of the [first-stage] tests admits they're wrong 5 percent of the time, and independent estimates say they're wrong 25 percent,'' said Lou Maltby, an ACLU official in New York.
Managers rarely defend employees who test positive, because it's less risky simply to get rid of them, he said.
The survey also showed that the number of companies that have drug education programs declined slightly to 47 percent as of this April, compared with 50 percent last year. Likewise, the number of companies offering their supervisors training to spot drug abuse went down to 48 percent from 54 percent.
``If cost cutting is the rationale for elimination of such programs, the decision may prove penny-wise but pound-foolish,'' the study report said, because companies with anti-drug programs consistently report lower test-positive rates.
by CNB