“Catching the Stupid Drug Users”

Bill and I had a really enjoyable conversation today with a gentleman who oversees a number of construction sites that have multiple contractors/subcontractors on each site. Drug use is a great concern and the workers are all subjected to pre-employment tests, post-accident tests, random tests, for-cause tests, tests based on number of hours worked, etc. All the testing done is urine testing administered by a third party provider.

Even with all that drug testing, the feeling they have is that they are still “only catching the stupid drug users.” Now there is definitely a lot of merit to doing that. The “stupid" ones are probably the employees to be the most concerned about as far as accident risk, productivity loss, violent behavior, etc. But there a lot more drug users who escape under the radar. They know how to adulterate the urine samples, substitute samples (congratulations, sir, you passed your drug test but it turns out you’re pregnant), they time things so they know when to stop using drugs to avoid detection.

It seems like such an inefficient system. You’re spending all this money on drug testing, 90%+ of the people you are testing aren’t even on drugs, and you’re still missing some of the ones who are.

I’m not going to go off on a big sales pitch here, but doesn’t it make sense to have a system in place that can proactively and non-invasively determine if there is a problem and where those problems are? Then when you find evidence of drug use, focus your resources on areas where you know there’s a problem instead of trying to find that needle in the haystack. That’s the power of DrugWipe.