A file variety of U.S. employees are dishonest on employer drug exams by tampering with urine samples or utilizing different means to evade detection, new analysis reveals.
The proportion of staff who tried to faux the outcomes of office drug screenings jumped greater than six-fold in 2023 from the earlier 12 months, in response to Quest Diagnostics, a nationwide drug testing firm.
The surge in employees attempting to cover their drug use comes as extra states throughout the U.S. legalize leisure marijuana use. The shifting authorized setting and altering societal norms round hashish use is forcing employers to overview their drug-testing insurance policies. The chief goal of employer-mandated drug exams is to make sure a secure office, whereas leisure drug use also can have an effect on employee productiveness.
“Workforce drug testing exists as a result of it is meant as a deterrence mechanism,” Dr. Suhash Harwani, senior director of science for workforce well being options at Quest, informed CBS MoneyWatch. “That is why it was based — to make sure office security.”
Quest’s evaluation of lab information additionally discovered that the drug positivity charge for the general U.S. workforce remained at a file excessive of 4.6%, up from a low of three.5% between 2010 and 2012.
As of April 2024, leisure marijuana is authorized in 24 states, or practically half the nation, in response to the Pew Analysis Middle.
How employees cheat
Employees sometimes used one in all two strategies to foil an employer’s drug testing protocols: substituting their urine specimens by changing them with artificial formulation and even animal urine, or submitting invalid specimens, suggesting they’d been tampered with as a way to conceal drug use.
“Given the rising acceptance and use of some medicine, significantly marijuana, it might be unsurprising that some folks really feel it essential to try to cheat a drug take a look at,” Dr. Harwani stated in an announcement. “It’s attainable that our society’s normalization of drug use is fostering environments during which some staff really feel it’s acceptable to make use of such medicine with out really understanding the influence they’ve on office security.”
Some consultants expressed concern in regards to the findings, saying they underline a necessity to enhance drug testing insurance policies and procedures.
“Drug exams are an essential software employers must preserve everybody in communities secure,” Katie Mueller, senior program supervisor on the Nationwide Security Council, informed CBS MoneyWatch. “When coverage and process fails us or folks make selections to change their exams for no matter cause, it places everybody in danger.”
Concerning the widening push to legalize hashish, Mueller added that “we have to have a very open dialogue with staff, employers and lawmakers in regards to the impacts of legalization, and the way it’s trickling all the way down to the office.”
Dr. Harwani stated there could possibly be higher methods of testing staff and job candidates for drug use than counting on urine samples. For instance, the U.S. Division of Transportation lately accepted oral fluid testing to detect drug use, along with utilizing urine samples.
Whereas urine samples are submitted in a non-public house, oral fluids are collected instantly by lab technicians. And whereas medicine can take time to indicate up in a donor’s urine pattern, they are often detected in saliva instantly after they’re used.
