NCJ Number
197210
Date Published
August 2002
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This paper examines the ways in which various types of employer drug testing can provide false positives and result in severe impacts on employees' careers and lives.
Abstract
Steven Karch, a medical researcher and author of "Karch's Pathology of Drug Abuse" reports that "Innocent people are being mislabeled because of unreliable products designed to cast a wide net." Even the confirmation test for a positive urine test, called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), is not perfect. Kent Holtorf, a physician and expert on drug-testing accuracy, reports that "accuracy rates are going down, not up, as employers contract with the lowest-bidding lab." Further, most employers, even those who use a lab, do not confirm positives on pre-employment tests. Although drug tests are intended to detect the premeditated consumption of illegal addictive drugs, they do not account for the following circumstances: Robitussin and diet pills can give a false reading for amphetamines; Ibuprofen and various antibiotics can appear to be marijuana; kidney infection and diabetes can cause persons to test positive for cocaine; and migraine medications and anti-depressants can appear to be LSD. Drug-testing veterans, some independent studies, and even the makers' own data suggest that the following three leading "alternative technologies" can be error prone when testing for illegal drugs: on-site testing, sweat patch, and hair tests. This paper explains how errors may occur in each of these testing procedures.