The Ethics of Drug Testing

I know; most of you have been reading essays, rants, screeds, and in some cases legal briefs on this subject for years now, and you’re sick of hearing about it. Well, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t comment on the legality of drug testing in the workplace; and I’m not an ethicist, so I can’t really comment on whether the entire process is really ethical or not; I’m a management scientist and a strategy scholar, and that does qualify me to comment on the management implications and strategic value of these testing programs. And just on those bases, there’s still a lot worth commenting on…

Now, I understand all of the points about invasion of privacy and unreasonable searches and so on, but the fact still remains that I really want the pilot of an airliner I’m flying on, the bus I’m riding on, or even the gasoline truck I’m driving behind to be clean and sober. Unfortunately, if the person operating a vehicle of this type has a bad drug trip and winds up killing dozens (or hundreds) of people, the fact that the operator can be sent to jail for long periods of time and sued for the wrongful deaths of their victims (assuming the pilot/driver survives in the first place!) isn’t going to matter to those who are killed, and it won’t matter much to their families, either. The stakes are so high, and the consequences of failure are so completely irreparable, that there is no way to “fix” the situation afterwards.

The problem is, drug testing is no real guarantee of safety, either. Any test method devised by humans can be beaten (if only by having somebody else provide the test samples), and even if someone does test clean, there’s nothing to prevent them from going out the NEXT day and getting hammered just before getting behind the wheel. A good manager, who works closely with his/her pilots or drivers and knows who is reliable and weeds out anyone likely to do something suicidally/homicidally stupid will help, but even the straightest people do slip off that straight and narrow way sometimes. I can tell you from personal experience that there’s no judging a book by its cover on this issue – and that sometimes the last person you would ever expect will turn out to be the one with the secret drug problem.

Then there’s the issue of false positives. Everybody knows these happen; there was even a segment on Mythbusters a few years back where they determined that you can get a false positive for at least 12 hours (possibly 18) after eating a poppy seed cake or roll. So you might find yourself watching an innocent hippie (who just happens to love poppy seed cakes) like a hawk, while a straight-arrow prig who irons and starches his underwear does a big pile of blow the day after a drug test and then crashes a tour bus into a corner market. It happens, folks. Drug and alcohol users have to be lucky every time; failure causes under critical conditions only have to get "lucky" once...

From a management standpoint, a drug test will never replace the need to know your people, keep a close watch over them, and help the ones who are making bad choices make better ones. This will always be part of the manager’s role, and if you don’t want to do those things, you may want to consider another line of work. From a strategic standpoint, random drug testing may or may not help your company avoid fines, legal exposure, and other problems (check with your corporate counsel), but it won’t replace the need for good line managers, and it can’t make you completely safe from drug-related problems. If you feel that the potential savings to be realized by preventing possible drug-related incidents (or just being able to demonstrate in court that you’ve made every effort to prevent them) exceeds the costs of lowering morale, generating employee resentment, losing valuable personnel, and being sued for invasion of privacy, then go ahead, but rest assured, no matter which way you choose to go, someone somewhere will tell you that you should have done the opposite.

Sometimes there really aren’t any good answers. It’s worth thinking about…