Pubdate: Sun, 30 Oct 2005
Source: Forum. The  (ND)
Copyright: 2005 Forum Communications Co.
Contact:  http://www.in-forum.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/991
Author: David J. Chapman
Note: Chapman is a Fargo attorney and occasional contributor to The 
Forum's opinion/commentary pages
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)

DRUG TESTING THREATENS OUR LIBERTY

Until I tried my first federal drug crime case, I had never seen an 
illegal drug up close. I could not have differentiated between 
marijuana and tea leaves. I am not embarrassed by the naivete on this 
issue. I simply have no inclination to venture into the subculture of 
drugs   it never even occurred to me.

As a drug na?ve citizen, I still find the trend towards mandatory, 
random drug testing in the workplace to be disturbing. Random drug 
tests mean just that. The workforce is targeted at random in the 
workplace and tested for controlled substances through urinalysis. 
The drug user and the drug na?ve are all caught in the same net.

The famous English jurist, Sir William Blackstone, opined that the 
power to regulate conduct should be used in such a manner as to 
create as little pointless imposition on personal liberty as 
possible. Nothing is more invasive of personal liberty than forcing 
all employees   even those who have given no reason to suspect them 
of drug use   to submit to random tests. All of us should be 
concerned by yet another imposition on our liberty.

Looking behind the justifications for testing, it appears that our 
medical community has latched onto a great money-making scheme by 
creating a furor over testing, but what does random testing achieve? 
As it is random there is no guarantee that the hard-core user will be 
caught. If you test three people out of 100, none of whom are users, 
and you leave the hard-core user on the job, then you have just 
achieved nothing more than filling the coffers of already rich 
medical organizations who conduct the tests. The workplace is not 
safer. The user is still there and is still a danger.

What is it with the use of illegal drugs that makes them so special? 
They are so special because selling testing to the public is easy to 
rationalize. Why not test for alcohol consumption? Let's have a 
breath test station at the door of every workplace to test for 
alcohol. After all, alcohol kills too. The difference is that alcohol 
consumption is legal and drugs are not. Little argument will exist 
for invading the person of an employee for a urine test for something 
that is illegal, but employees and employers may balk at testing for 
alcohol use.

Why not body fat tests? Body fat is dangerous. Obesity causes heart 
attacks, increased medical premiums, lost productivity. However, once 
again, food is not illegal and neither is being fat.

In the end the medical community has found a tremendous source of 
income that produces little or no guarantee, namely performing 
medical tests on healthy people under the guise of workplace safety 
and liability.

But why not test for drugs when they are illegal? If you do not use 
then you should not be concerned. Shouldn't we all do our part to 
detect illegal drug use? Maybe, but we should also be concerned when 
our government allows employers to step into a pseudo law enforcement 
role. Catching criminals is a police function. We would not let the 
government perform such invasions of privacy without proper 
justification and we should not allow our employers to do so either.

As individuals we have a certain level of liberty that is inherent in 
our natural rights as individuals. We should not falter in our 
defense of those rights and certainly should not surrender them 
lightly. We should fear the day that we simply submit to impositions 
on liberty by accepting the assurances of those who can profit from 
those impositions.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake