Why Drug Test?

According to the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 8.4 percent of full-time employees (10.2 million) and 10.1 percent of part-time employees (3 million) aged 18 or older reported using illicit drugs within the past month. Employees who abuse drugs are 2.5 times more likely than other non-substance abusing coworkers to be absent for eight or more days. Drug abusers are 3.6 times more likely to be involved in an accident at work and 5 times more likely to file a workers compensation claim. 44% of abusers have sold drugs to other employees and 18% have stolen from co-workers to support their habit.

Drug testing programs aim to filter out drug users and deter drug use in the workplace. In two analyses of data (2002-2004; 2006) from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, past-month illicit drug users:

• Said they would be less likely than those reporting no current illicit drug use to work for employers that conducted pre-employment drug testing (18.2% vs. 3.7%)
• Were more likely to report working for an employer that did not test employees for drugs compared to those working for employers that did (10.8% vs. 7.4 %).
• Reported they would be far less likely to work for employers that conduct random drug testing compared to those reporting no current illicit drug use (29.1% of past-month illicit drug users answered this way vs. 6.9% of non-users).