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Doctor Said There Was No
Way It Could Show A False Positive
By Karin Schill
Rives
Source: Augusta
Chronicle
Three days after
landing his dream job at a Durham, N.C., technology company, Davey
Burroughs was escorted off its property in disgrace. A drug test,
the kind now used by 67 percent of large U.S. companies to screen
employees, had revealed traces of cocaine in his urine.
Burroughs, 35, was
shocked. ''I told them it's not possible, because I'm not a user,''
he said. ''But the doctor said there was no way it could show a
false positive, and that I must have either smoked or inhaled it. It
was an absolute horror.''
Most drug tests in
American work places are uneventful, a routine matter for workers
and their employers. But more employees such as Burroughs are
challenging the results of drug tests, insisting that errors and
sloppy practices in the largely unregulated drug-testing industry
are costing them their jobs.
Determined to clear
his name, Burroughs bought a test kit at a pharmacy and took it to
the Durham clinic that had tested him. Concentra, the health-care
company that owns the clinic, agreed to conduct a second test - this
time on a hair follicle. It came back negative.
Two weeks after he
was fired, Burroughs was reinstated as a technician at ExceLight
Communications, vindicated with back pay and - he said - an apology
from his boss. Bill Clark, human-resource manager for the
fiber-optic cable company, said the company took Burroughs' work
history into consideration when it decided to give him the job back.
Burroughs had been
an ExceLight employee for several years and then worked as a
temporary worker while in school before he was re-hired earlier this
summer. He had no known history of drug abuse.
Only 4.5 percent of
tests conducted at large U.S. corporations come back positive today,
down from more than 18 percent in the late 1980s, according to the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency claims the
decline shows the success of corporate anti-drug policies.
But it also should
be noted today's workers are more likely to fight back if a drug
test comes back positive. Last month, a jury awarded a dismissed
Delta Air Lines flight attendant in Oregon $400,000 in damages after
a laboratory incorrectly reported that she had cheated on a drug
test.
Revelations of
practices at the lab, which surfaced before the trial began,
prompted the federal government last fall to launch an investigation
into 56 laboratories that validate drug tests on 1.7 million federal
employees and 8.3 million workers at airlines, trucking firms and
other companies regulated by the government. The audit of 13 million
specimens found 300 test results that were incorrect and had to be
reversed.
''There is a human
factor, and wherever humans are involved, mistakes can happen,''
said Travis Payne, an employment lawyer who advises police officers,
firefighters and other public-sector employees about drug testing.
He tells clients
who are called in to submit urine samples to immediately go out and
pay for a separate test. That way, they have a better chance at
challenging their dismissal in case a test shows a false positive
for drugs.
But workers in the
private sector are far less protected by law or by practice.
Concentra, which
used a separate lab that it owns in Memphis, Tenn., to validate
Burroughs' drug test last month, stands by its results, claiming two
different readings does not necessarily mean either was wrong.. The
two tests cover different time periods; it's possible, at least in
theory, that a hair test wouldn't show recent drug use.
''We're extremely
careful in our collections and certainly at the lab,'' said John
Berry of the Dallas health-care company. ''I'm very confident the
testing was done correctly.'' But he also acknowledged that once in
a while, a case will raise questions.
''A lot of time,
people say that they haven't taken drugs and then they just quietly
go away,'' Berry said. ''And then occasionally you see someone fight
it hard, and it kind of makes you wonder.''
Although drug tests
are an accepted practice at many workplaces today, some employees
nonetheless view them as an invasion of privacy.
''From a civil
liberties standpoint, it always seemed questionable to test people
for drugs that aren't affecting their work performance,'' said Dr.
Cynthia Kuhn, a professor of pharmacology at Duke University Medical
School and co-author of ''Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most
Used and Abused Drugs From Alcohol to Ecstasy'' (W.W. Norton, 1998,
$14.95).
''Although drugs
are illegal and it means a person may have a serious life problem,
if (they) smoke crack on a Saturday, there's no reason to think they
couldn't do their work Monday,'' she said.
Some use such
arguments to peddle products that help rebellious employees beat the
system.
Today you can order
clean urine, detoxification tablets and much more over the Internet.
Web sites such as PassYourDrugTest.com -- http://alwaystestclean.com
-- and BodyCleansers -- http://bodycleansers.com -- offer products
they promise will help drug-using workers escape detection.
Kuhn said the
availability of such products might have contributed to the drop in
positive test results. But she also said that a good analysis of
drug tests will detect attempts to tamper with a sample.
Pam Sherry, a
spokeswoman for Laboratory Corporation of America, one of the
largest drug-testing labs in the country, said her company finds a
small number of samples every year that have been tampered with.
There are also cases in which the drug tests can't be analyzed, for
instance if a patient drank large amounts of water before being
tested and the urine became too diluted, she said.
Source: Augusta
Chronicle, The (GA)
Author: Karin
Schill Rives
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