Your Urine, Please.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Effects of mandatory drug testing - Column

The fascination with urine remains undimmed through the ages. Until the arrival of scientific medicine, physicians subjected it to careful visual scrutiny, expecting the color and clarity to reveal an exact diagnosis. Today, it's the corporate class that seems transfixed by the predictive powers of piss: 80 percent of large employers insist on testing job applicants' urine--or occasionally hair or blood--for damning traces of illegal substances. You can be the best qualified applicant in all other ways, but if your urine speaks against you, you're out. Experience, skill, enthusiasm, and energy--pee trumps them all.

It's odd, given employers' lack of concern about the rest of their employees' private lives, that they take so much interest in the off-hour consumption of drugs. The members of the employing class, after all, don't seem to care whether their potential employees spend their weekends consuming kiddie porn or abusing their pets. Nor do most employers show the slightest concern about the adequacy of their employees' diets and housing arrangements. In fact, they will be delighted to hire you for $6 or $7 an hour even though, on wages like that, you will probably be unable to observe the most elementary proprieties, like living indoors and showering before showing up for work.

Odder still, especially for those who think of capitalism as the most "rational" of economic systems, drug testing doesn't work, even on the employers' rather Scrooge-like terms. A report released last September by the ACLU, "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment," summarizes studies showing that drug testing does not lower absenteeism, improve workplace safety, or achieve any of the other goals claimed for it by the anti-drug warriors. This should be no surprise: The tests mainly detect marijuana, which lingers in the body far longer than cocaine or heroin, and drug testing labs are often alarmingly inaccurate, in both the false-negative and false-positive directions. In addition, smart drug users have all kinds of ways of foiling the test, from the herb goldenseal (available in health food stores) to vials of drug-free, battery-warmed urine (available on the Web). More to the point, most drug users confine their drug using to their off hours, when it can have little or no possible effect on their job performance. The residual mental effects of a weekend joint, for example, are about as powerful as those of a Saturday night beer--i.e., nil. Not to mention the fact...