By Christopher Lee Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A17
Federal workers who submit to drug screening soon may have their saliva, sweat or hair tested as the Bush administration increases efforts to deter and detect illegal drug use among 1.6 million civilian employees.
Officials have relied on urine samples alone in the federal government's nearly two-decade-old drug-testing program, begun in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order declaring that the federal workplace be drug-free. Bush administration officials want to give agencies the option of using the alternative tests to catch drug use that urine tests may miss because of masking agents or because an employee took the drugs weeks earlier.
The main goal is to drive home the message to federal workers that it is not worth risking your job to take drugs, officials said.
"This isn't a 'gotcha' kind of system," said Robert L. Stephenson II, director of the division of workplace programs in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, sets guidelines and oversees drug-testing programs at federal agencies. "This is a fair, objective, scientifically defensible program that is aimed at deterrence and in having everybody believe that if you actually use [drugs], we'll be able to detect it."
The division plans to publish proposed revisions to federal mandatory drug-testing guidelines in the Federal Register as soon as this month, Stephenson said.
The public will have 90 days to comment. After a final rule is adopted, it will take at least six months to implement in most federal workplaces, Stephenson said. Moreover, the screening labs that work under contract to federal agencies would have to demonstrate that they can perform the new tests.
The proposal was first reported last week by the Associated Press.
Officials of federal employee unions said they will study the proposals closely.
Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said her union previously has opposed sweat tests on the grounds that scientific studies have shown them to be unreliable. Her staff plans to review the track record of saliva and hair tests as well.
Mark Roth, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union fought successful court battles in the 1980s to force the government to narrow its broad drug-testing program to workers in "safety-sensitive" jobs.
"To the extent that they are not talking about expanding the scope of employees under the program, . . . we probably would not have any vehement objections to what they are doing, so long as it's limited to the more accurate and less intrusive forms of testing," he said.
Federal drug-testing efforts focus on about 400,000 federal employees who have security clearances, carry firearms, deal with public safety or national security, or are presidential appointees. Such employees are routinely tested when they apply for jobs, and many are subject to random drug tests throughout their careers.
Other civilian workers typically would only be tested if they were involved in a workplace accident or displayed signs of possible drug use on the job, officials said.
In fiscal 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available, drug tests were performed on 106,493 workers at 118 agencies at a cost of $6.1 million. The number who test positive hovers consistently at about one-half of 1 percent, he said.
Urine tests cost about $20 to $50 each, and the prices of saliva and sweat tests are similar, Stephenson said. Hair tests cost more but are expected to become cheaper as they become more widely used, he said.
Agencies could pick the test that best fits their needs, he said. For example, a hair test, which can show drug use from months earlier, might be used to screen job applicants. But an employee involved in an accident might have an oral swab to determine whether drugs were in his system.
Some employee advocates complain that the new tests are not as accurate as a urine test. Hair tests in particular can come back positive simply because a person -- a police officer, say -- was in a room where drugs were used, they say.
"There's a lot of things not to like [about urine testing], but at least we've reached a stage where you don't see a lot of false positives when you use the right labs," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit employee rights group. "Sweat and saliva testing have potential, but they aren't ready for prime time. . . . Hair testing is junk science."
Federal workers aren't the only ones with a stake in the proposed changes. If the government adopts alternative tests, many private employers are likely to follow suit, officials at testing companies said.
William M. Greenblatt, chief executive of New York-based Sterling Testing Systems Inc., said: "An argument can be made that 'Would the government accept it if it wasn't an accurate science?' " The company performs half a million tests a year, most of them urine tests, for such clients as Con Edison, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and The Washington Post, he said.
J. Michael Walsh, a former HHS official who helped design the federal drug-testing program in the 1980s, said the testing industry has been pressing the government to adopt the alternative tests. Still, scientific advances mean it is "very reasonable" for federal officials to examine whether such tests are worth using, said Walsh, now a consultant on substance abuse policy whose clients include The Post.
"The industry sort of believes that once this thing hits the Federal Register that things are going to happen quickly," he said. "I don't think that's true. My experience has been that change comes very slowly in this whole workplace arena. It's such a litigious area. I think these big corporations are very happy with what they are doing. And unless there is some huge economic incentive to change, change is not going to come rapidly."