Drug Screening In The Workplace: Article Analysis

The Legal and Ethical Aspects of Drug Screening in the Workplace
Introduction
Workplace drug screening policies in America revolve around the risk management views of corporate accountants and lawyers, and do not consider the individual rights of employees. Risk management can be defined as the process of analyzing exposure to risk and determining how to best handle that exposure (investorwords.com). Since companies are concerned with profitability, the risk can further be defined as what is the financial cost vs. the financial benefit of implementing a drug screening policy.
In the article "Employer Drug Testing Has Pitfalls" by Lee Fletcher (Fletcher, 2000, 1-2), he interviews 5 different companies about the downside to drug screening.
They contend that a decade of drug testing has failed to produce evidence that testing curbs workplace problems and drug abuse. "The evidence shows that [drug testing] is not only morally wrong but a colossal waste of money," said Lewis Maltby, director of the ACLU's Workplace Rights Project. Maltby argues that people "shouldn't be fired for what they do in their off time unless it affects their job performance." Greenberg agrees that there is not enough evidence to show if testing cuts down on overall drug use, but he says it does let the company identify specific drug users. Though he supports drug testing, Eric Wish, PhD, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland, said, "Still, I don't know of any evidence that someone who casually uses marijuana . . .has more accidents than anyone else."(Drug Testing [DT], 1996,
The ACLU report, "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment," says employers are wasting billions of dollars by requiring workers and job candidates to submit to urine testing. The study, released last week, cited 10 years of data from researchers, including the National Academy of Sciences. "Drug testing does little or nothing to improve safety or productivity," said Lewis Maltby, director of the ACLU's workplace rights project in New York. That's because very few employees use drugs to begin with, and those who do, typically use them at home, not at work, Maltby said. "Smoking marijuana on Saturday night is no more a safety risk to employers than drinking beer on Saturday nights," Maltby said. The ACLU opposes random drug screening and supports testing only when there is some suspicion of employee drug use. Studies claiming that drug use costs employers billions of dollars annually are based on faulty research, the ACLU report said. A recent survey of 63 Silicon Valley companies found that urine testing reduces worker productivity, the ACLU said (Las Vegas Review-Journal [LVRJ], 1999,