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The pros and cons of employer drug testing programs In the USA testing for drugs is widely applied among civil servants, in industrial and transport agencies, in banks, in army and in fleet. Already 81 % of private companies check employees working for them and 98 % of firms check the people taken into the service. Besides, many kinds of activity cant receive licenses without regular check of their personnel for the probable usage of drugs is fulfilled. Protectors of employee drugs testing programs have the following arguments: American business annually loses more than 100 billion because of larceny, accidents, spoilage at production and absence from work without good reason connected with drugs. 71 % of all addicts work. 81 % of the basic US enterprises check the employees for drugs. 98 % of the USA companies check the future employees for the probable illegal use of drugs.
drug users flown down in those companies which do not make such checks. Refusal from drugs check realization is more expensive, than realization of this check. However along with protectors in the USA there are many opponents of taking such tests. They state that in the US employee drug testing programs actually bring more harm, than advantage.
Certainly, the prospect of such testing really may frighten off someone from the use of forbidden preparations and, certainly, revealing of users will increase the opportunities of police in attraction of drugs business participants to the criminal liability. But there is also the reverse of the medal. First, such measures may encourage the population to the greater use of legal preparations, such as, for example, alcohol. Secondly, behind all the testing programs there are large medical companies which make these tests and do their utmost to push these goods on the market.
Let alone the moral side of a question concerning rights of the person to have private life and its protection against unauthorized intrusion from the outside. Privacy, the right of private life inviolability of is among the most valuable and fragile properties of a modern human society. If to follow one of the most known definitions, privacy is a right to left on your own; the right according which each person has the space protected by the law from any encroachments from the outside including from the part of the government. Any unreasonable infringement of personal privacy by the state no matter what means were used, should be considered as infringement of the Fourth amendment [to the Constitution of the USA]. -" said the member of the Supreme court of the USA Luis Brandeis in the well-known speech. Privacy is related to fundamental human rights and exposed to careful studying and the analysis. Authors of the one of classifications conditionally divide privacy into four groups: personal data privacy, physical privacy, territorial privacy and communications privacy.
As it was determined, employer drug testing violates two of them: personal data privacy and physical privacy. Every day many people all over the world fill in tax and customs declarations, questionnaires for the reception of passports, questionnaires for employment, great quantity of other questionnaires. Internet users encounter these questionnaires while trying to get an access to a forum, a free-of-charge letter box or enter the legislation database. This huge number of questionnaires is poured from one server to another, filtered, and sorted. How? Where exactly?
Usually you do not know the answer. In all sincerity, you seldom worry about that. You were asked a couple of questions about age, work, and habits. Nothing to write home about. Meantime no-purpose use of the personal data is capable to do a big harm to the person, especially if the question is about so-called sensitive data - the data which demand the most delicate handling.
The information on incomes and on state of the health is related to them. There are cases when serious medical diagnoses filtered through walls of hospital contrary to the desire of the patient, and consequences appeared rather deplorable. The American patients rights coalition provides on its Internet page a number of examples when people lost work and family because of the fault of the doctor who sent the diagnosis by fax to his (persons) chief. In the beginning of 1999 not one or two but thousand medical diagnoses appeared in the Internet because of Michigan university employees negligence.
The database laid in a available place more than for two months when the student-physician casually found it and sounded the alarm. Fortunately, that case didnt do too much harm to the patients. Such facts testify about the infringement of medical secrecy. However, not only patients become victims of doctors and their assistants negligence.
The personal data may be used for blackmail, intimidation, extortion or - more prosaically - pushing of the product to the market. American company "Doubleclick" appeared under the fire of criticism on the part of the Internet community when it declared the intention to use the data on the clients in the marketing purposes. Human rights protectors and independent network press pulled "Doubleclick" to pierces. The problem is so serious, that national governments and international organizations devote the time to its solving. So, on December, 15, 1997, European Union accepted special instruction on personal data protection. In Switzerland such law operates since 1992, and in Sweden there is even a special body (Datainspektionen).
In 1998 it considered 269 complaints, 199 among them formed the basis for investigations. When the question is about the personal data, protectors principles are simple and clear. The person should have the opportunity and the right to: a) look through the data and change it; b) correct the incorrect (old) data; a) receive the protection of the law if the data are not properly used. Speaking about physical privacy, we mean various compulsory medical procedures which also include employer drug testing.
British police takes DNA analyses from all prisoners for inclusion in a national database. Critics assert that up to 40 % of "fast" tests for drugs and alcohol are not reliable. Moreover, some quite legal substances are determined as drugs. For example, depronil which is applied for Parkinson illness, "is similar" to amphetamine and even innocent kernels on your favorite roll may give positive result at testing for heroin.
The American Civil Liberties Union goes up against disorderly urine testing because the procedure is both unjust and needless. It is inequitable to force employees who are not even supposed to be using drugs, and whose job presentation is acceptable, to "confirm" their blamelessness through a humiliating and unsure procedure that infringes personal privacy. Such tests are needless because they cannot identify injury and, thus, in no way improve an employer's ability to assess or forecast job presentation. The organizations states that urine tests cannot find out when a drug was used. they can only identify the "metabolites, " or unmoving available traces of previously swallowed substances. For example, a person who used drugs on Sunday night may test positive the following Thursday, long after the drug stopped to have any effect.
In that case, what the employee did on Sunday is not related to his or her conformity to work on Wednesday. At the same time, an employee can use drugs on the way to work and test negative that same day. That is because the drug has not yet been metabolized and is, consequently, not found in the person's urine. The drug screens used by most companies are not trustworthy. These tests defer wrong positive results at least 10 percent, and perhaps as much as 30 percent, of the time. Experts agree that the tests are untrustworthy.
At a recent conference, 120 forensic scientists, including some who worked for manufacturers of drug tests, were asked, "Is there anybody who would submit urine for drug testing if his career, reputation, freedom or livelihood depended on it?" Not a single hand was raised. Although more exact tests are obtainable, they are dear and rarely used. And even the more correct tests can give inexact results because of the laboratory error. A survey by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, a government agency, found that 20 percent of the labs surveyed mistakenly reported the presence of illegal drugs in drug-free urine samples. Untrustworthiness also springs from the tendency of drug screens to confound similar chemical compounds. For example, codeine and Vicks Formula 44 -M have been known to produce positive results for heroin, Advil for marijuana, and Nyquil for amphetamines.
Such testing may be the simplest way to recognize drug users, but it is also by far the most un-American. Americans customarily supposed that all-purpose searches of blameless people are unjust. This custom springs from colonial times, when King George's soldiers searched everyone aimlessly in order to discover those few people who were committing crimes against the Crown. Early Americans severely detested these common searches, which were the principal reason of the Revolution. After the Revolution, when reminiscences of the experience with searches were still fresh, the Fourth Amendment was adopted. It says that the government cannot search everyone to find the few who might be responsible for the crime.
The government must have serious motive to deduce about an exact person before subjecting him or her to invasive body searches. These longstanding principles of fairness should also apply to the private sector, even though the Fourth Amendment only applies to government action. Urine tests are body searches, and they are an extraordinary attack of privacy. The ordinary practice, in administering such tests, is to necessitate employees to urinate in the presence of a witness to guard against sample tampering. In the words of one judge, that is "an experience which even if courteously supervised can be humiliating and degrading.
Drug testing is a form of inspection, although a technological one. " Bibliography Hartwell, T; Steele, PD; Rodman, N. "Workplace alcohol-testing programs: Prevalence and trends. " Monthly Labor Review. 1998. Henderson, DR. "A humane economist's case for drug legalization. " University of California Davis Law Review. 1991. 24: 655 - 676. DiNardo, J; Lemieux, T. Alcohol, marijuana, and American youth: The unintended effects of government regulation. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. 1992. 25 pp. NBER Working Paper Series # 4212.
Caulkins, JP; Rydell, CP; Ever ingham, SS. An Ounce of prevention, a pound of uncertainty: The cost-effectiveness of - drug prevention programs. Santa Monica, CA: Rand. 1999. Barnum, DT; Gleason, JM. "The credibility of drug tests: A multisite Bayesian analysis. " Industrial and Labor Relations Review. 1994.
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Research essay sample on Fourth Amendment Drug Testing
