Pissing Contest.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: American Civil Liberties Union report argues employee drug testing is not cost-effective - Brief Article

Since the late 1980s, the degrading ritual of peeing into a cup on demand has become increasingly familar to American employees. This trend has been accompanied by remarkably little skepticism about the cost-effectiveness of drug testing. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (available at www.aclu.org/issues/worker/drugtesting1999.pdf) seeks to remedy that situation, arguing that drug testing is a bad investment for employers.

The report shows that commonly accepted claims about the impact of illegal drug use in the workplace have little or no basis in fact. The widely cited estimate that drug use costs $100 billion in "lost productivity" each year, for instance, is based on a simplistic study that "compared the annual income of households that contained a daily marijuana user to the annual income of households that did not." Supporters of drug testing often cite authoritative-sounding numbers from something called the "Firestone Study." No such study exists.

"Absenteeism is the only workplace performance measure on which drug users and nonusers consistently differ," the report says. Since the studies do not control for age or sex, this...