Are your employee drug tests accurate? - Safety and Health

HR Magazine, Jan, 2003 by Diane Cadrain

The Whizzinator, an easy-to-conceal, simple-to-use device with a realistic prosthetic penis, comes complete with an adjustable belt, a 4-ounce vinyl bag, dehydrated toxin-free urine and organic beat pads--all for only $149.95.

Why would HR professionals need to know about this contraption?

Because The Whizzinator, made by Puck Technologies of Signal Hill, Calif., is only one of a swarm of products that aims to help employees--both male and female--beat your company's drug tests.

Other items available on the Internet include products that potential test cheaters ingest or drop into specimen cups. There is even "clean" urine for sale that drug abusers can substitute for their own.

The existence of these products is bad news for employers, who fork over considerable sums of money each year to test their employees.

Reasons for conducting these tests vary widely. Some employers, including those in the transportation and nuclear power industries, are required by federal law to test employees for drug use. Others face similar mandates at the state and local level.

Some employers test voluntarily because they operate in one of the 11 states that offer discounted workers' compensation premiums to companies that have drug-free workplaces. In fact, 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies have drug-free workplace policies, according to the Institute for a Drugfree Workplace. Also, 67 percent of employers have drug-testing policies, says the American Medical Association.

Actually, all organizations have a practical incentive to test, given that substance abusers generally are not ideal employees. According to the American Council on Drug Education, drug abusers are:

* 10 times more likely to miss work than those who are clean and sober.

* 3.6 times more likely to be involved in on-the-job accidents.

* 5 times more likely to file workers' comp claims.

* 33 percent less productive.

In addition, more than 75 percent of all drug users are employed somewhere, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a division of the Health and Human Services Department (HHS).

Employers aren't the only ones who pay the price for drug abuse; employees pay a heavy toll also. Substance abuse jeopardizes health, self-esteem, relationships and income. The price tag is so high, starting with the stigma of addiction and ending with the ultimate disgrace of discharge, that some employees would do anything to avoid a positive result.

Enter the entrepreneurs.

How Employees Cheat

"Most of the products for beating drug tests are for urine tests, because 90 percent of employers who do drug testing take urine samples," says Donna Smith, Ph.D., senior vice president of Substance Abuse Management Inc. (SAMI) in St. Petersburg, Fla., a third-party administrator of drug- free workplace programs.

"By far the most preferred resource is dilution," says Leo Kadehjian, Ph.D., an independent biomedical consultant in Palo Alto, Calif. "There are many products available on the Internet that claim to help rid the body of toxins. But they work only because of the large amounts of water the user has to consume along with them."

Another way to beat a drug test is to add chemicals to a urine specimen, thereby disrupting the testing process itself or making the drugs undetectable. In the past, test cheaters used common household chemicals such as denture tablets, eye drops or bleach. Today, entrepreneurs are offering more sophisticated products. These include:

* Oxidizing agents, which chemically alter or destroy drugs and/or their metabolites. Examples include products named Klear, Whizzies and Urine Luck.

* Non-oxidizing adulterants, such as UrineAid and Clear Choice, which change the pH of a urine sample or the ionic strength of the sample, or cross-link the enzymes used in many tests.

* Surfactants, or soaps, such as Mary Jane's Super Clean 13, which, when added directly to a urine sample in the proper amounts, can form microscopic droplets with fatty interiors that trap fatty marijuana metabolites, making them invisible in screening tests.

* The Whizzinator and other products that let employees substitute drug-free urine for their own. One intrepid Hendersonville, N.C., entrepreneur, Kenneth Curtis of Privacy Protection Service, even sells his own urine--guaranteed drug and adulterant free--along with a substitution kit consisting of a pouch, a tube, a chemical hand warmer and a temperature monitoring system.

For products like these, the best detection methods--pat-downs or direct observation of someone giving a sample-skate along the edges of privacy violation. Federal rules allow those actions only if there's a good reason to believe the person may be cheating. That presents a challenge for employers and the drug testing industry, which is onto such scams.

Testing Industry Fights Back

"As adulterant companies come out with new products, labs test to detect what it is they're using to mask the drug," says Laura Shelton, executive director of the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA) in Alexandria, Va.