Study: 'We need more drug testing!'

[The study] found that 9.4 million illicit drug users and 10.1 million heavy drinkers have full-time jobs.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT! People with full-time jobs are doing drugs and drinking alcohol? What could that possibly say about people who use drugs and alcohol? Thank God the federal government didn't jump to the COMPLETELY DANGEROUS CONCLUSION that people who use drugs and alcohol might actually be, on occasion, competent enough to hold down a full-time job. Seriously, with all that drug and alcohol use, the ENTIRE FUCKING ECONOMY must be on the VERGE OF COLLAPSE!

Or something.

It's clear from the title of the study, "Worker Substance Use and Workplace Policies and Programs," that the entire thing is designed to scare employers into leaping onto the drug testing bandwagon. I'm not suggesting the study doesn't demonstrate anything useful whatsoever; there are plenty of interesting nuggets about the various contexts for drug and alcohol use in America. It's the conclusions they want us to draw and the information they don't bother to report on that are problematic. Here are just a few samples.

For starters, the study notes:

Of the major occupational groups, food service workers (17.4 percent) and construction workers (15.1 percent) exhibited a higher prevalence of past month illicit drug use than other occupational groups. Those working in education, training, and library occupations (4.1 percent), community and social services occupations (4.0 percent), and protective service occupations (3.4 percent) had the lowest prevalence of past month illicit drug use among the major occupational groups.

What conclusion should you draw from this? Judging by press quotes, we should all believe we're in incredible peril:

"The high rates of drug and alcohol use in hazardous industries is cause for concern," said Elena Carr, drug policy coordinator at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). "Clearly businesses can ill-afford the risk of having workers operating meat slicers, backhoes, or other dangerous equipment while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, which is one reason why DOL helps employers and employees work together to proactively prevent such safety hazards."

Well, of course, no one wants people who are high on drugs operating dangerous equipment. But the study absolutely fails to make any clear correlation whatsoever between people who are "past month" users of drugs and alcohol and people who are guilty of dangerous workplace accidents while on drugs and alcohol. The study's proponents want us to believe that the sheer fact of any "past month" use means performance is inherently going to suffer. The study doesn't prove this at all; it doesn't even try. All the study states is that people in these "hazardous industries" use drugs and alcohol more often. A reasonable person could just as easily conclude that this is due to the fact that these industries are potentially more taxing and stressful by their nature and thus more workers in those industries seek chemical means to relax when they are not on the clock.

Additionally, the study really wants you to believe that drug use is costing employers money in absences and such. It reports with a totally straight face:

Among full-time workers who reported past month illicit drug use, 12.3 percent reported working for three or more employers in the past year, compared with 5.1 percent of workers without past month drug use. They also were more likely to report missing 2 or more workdays in the past month due to illness or injury when compared with workers without past month use (16.4 vs. 11.0 percent). Finally, 16.3 percent of workers who used illicit drugs in the past month reported skipping 1 or more days of work in the past month (vs. 8.2 percent of workers who did not use an illicit drug during the past month).

If you had no other context whatsoever, you might mistakenly conclude that drug users are just inherently more likely to skip out on work and be flakier about their employers. But in fact, the study itself demonstrates this is a flawed conclusion. Take a look earlier in this very post, where the study points out the food service workers and construction workers are at the high end of the illicit drug use scale, while library, education and community service workers are at the low end. Which end of the scale do you suppose actually has the highest rates of on-the-job injuries in general? The study doesn't even bother to normalize this direction. There's no record whatsoever in this study of what the overall average rates of absence or turnover are in any of these industries, data that is absolutely necessary to make any useful conclusions about whether "illicit" drug use is actually the primary driver of these absences or turnovers. They're basically making an apples to oranges comparison, instead of making comparisons within industries which might actually provide a useful perspective.

Finally, let's really focus on the underlying goal of the study, which is to model all of this use as so risky and destructive that wider drug testing ought to be applied across the board. The last two categories in the study are "Workplace Testing" and "Workplace Behaviors and Attitudes toward Drug Testing," in which the study points out:

Past month illicit drug users were less likely to report working for employers who conducted random drug or alcohol tests than were nondrug users.... More than half of U.S. workers reported that it would make no difference to them if an employer tests employees randomly after hire for drug or alcohol use.

That's really the money combination right there. If you're not abusing drugs, you probably don't care if random testing is happening. If random testing is happening more often, illicit drug users will have fewer perceived choices in the workplace. Illicit drug users are all criminals anyway, and non-users aren't going to complain, so let's roll out random drug testing for all Americans! Let's conveniently ignore the fact that a huge percentage of the drug and alcohol using population is gainfully employed and contributing to society - in fact, let's deliberately avoid architecting the study to determine how drug use might actually affect workplace performance, and instead just focus on the simple fact of "past month use" as a tautologically defined evil and then let the media spread the word about how much we need more drug testing. This actually fits in with the overall trend of Americans happily sacrificing most of their privacy out of sheer laziness, but still, it's a galling tactic to see so brazenly attempted.

OK, enough soapbox ranting. Sometimes shouting uselessly into the wind is therapeutic; sometimes, as in this case, it's just exhausting and depressing.