Peeing into a Dixie cup, for many candidates, is just as much a part of the job search as writing a new resume. Companies don't just want employees with a good school background and glowing references - they want them to be drug-free too.

Employers love drug testing. Not only do they keep unreliable employees off their payrolls (or so they imagine); by testing candidates, they do their part in America's "War on Drugs." But recently, the efficacy of pre-hire testing has been called into question.

With drug testing so common, the percentage of job candidates who show evidence of drug use during pre-hire testing has fallen dramatically. Good news? Not necessarily.

While the number of candidates who actually test positive for drugs has fallen, the number of prospective employees who cheat on their tests has risen. At the same time, recent studies have challenged the extent of productivity loss attributed to employee drug abuse.

Kenneth R. Collins, a behavioral healthcare consultant who writes frequently about drug abuse and treatment in the workplace, contends that drug testing is too limited to catch anyone but hard-core addicts, who typically can't gather the strength to apply for a job anyway.

"One does not have to be extremely clever to get around a pre-employment drug screen, only extremely motivated," says Collins. ~ Duping the drug testers

Drug test "cheating" has become so prevalent that drug-testing companies now typically test for adulterants, or products that can be slipped into the urine to cleanse it of drug use evidence. Drug users can even purchase freeze-dried urine that is ostensibly clean.

"It is commonly assumed that the growth of corporate drug testing programs has solved the workplace drug abuse problem," writes Becky Vance, senior director of Drug-Free Business Alliance, in the Houston Business Journal. "If only that were true."

Vance, outspoken about the need to continue testing, states that businesses are rewriting policies. Besides testing for "adulterants," companies are narrowing the window between the time the applicant must obtain a drug test and the offer of employment.

Indeed, the cleansing products industry has grown with the rise of drug testing. While the number of people using urine additives cannot be determined, the detoxification industry has exploded into a $50 million business, says Matt Stevens, marketing director of Spectrum Labs, which boasts a "200 percent guarantee" on detoxifying products at urineluck.com

Stevens claims Spectrum Lab's products are "currently undetectable."

"We're on our sixth generation of urine additives," says Stevens, of the Cincinnati-based company.

Testing out of fashion?

In 2001, nearly 61 percent of companies surveyed required applicants or new hires to submit to testing, according to the American Management Association's annual Medical Testing survey. This represents a seven percent drop from 1996, the peak year for pre-hiring testing.

Although companies don't give reasons for ending the practice, Ellen Bayer, the AMA's global human resources practice leader, says the data may reflect the fact that the tight labor market of recent years has caused some employers to be less picky about hires. If that means offering a job to the occasional pot smoker, so be it.

"Our perception was that for companies where knowledge competency is overriding and the market was tight, they seemed to be testing less as a pre-employment requirement," Bayer comments.

It's too early to tell if these companies are returning to their old pre-hire testing ways, she adds. ~

Collins, who has helped create substance abuse treatment programs for large companies, including Chevron, Bayer, Johnson & Johnson and Mobil, says pre-employment testing is likely here to stay. In some respects, he says, testing functions in lieu of an intelligence test.

"Someone who is looking for a white collar job should certainly understand that he can't expect to use [drugs] up to the point of the interview and not get screened out," he says. "I think we are past the point where companies would be inclined to overlook [positive tests] because of the competition for highly talented people."

Collins contends that the fact positive test results dropped from 13.6 percent of workers and applicants tested in 1988, to 4.7 percent in 2000, shows that drug screening does act as a deterrent to drug use.

"Companies are pretty well sold on the idea that if they do pre-employment drug screening, they will screen out a very tiny, but nonetheless identifiable, percentage of employees that are very active substance abusers," he says.

Winning the "War on Drugs"?

Drug testing first made a big splash in the workplace in the 1980s. As Nancy Reagan exhorted fifth graders to "just say no," the government mandated, among other things, the drug testing of employees in certain public-safety categories, such as railroad engineers and airline pilots.

While most private employers were not subject to these rules, many still adopted drug-testing programs.

Companies were also won over by claims, made mostly by manufacturers of drug tests, of the millions of dollars lost in worker productivity, absenteeism and health care utilization each year due to the ravages of drug use.

Naturally, the policies didn't escape court challenges. Opponents argued that drug testing was the practical equivalent of an "unreasonable search" and therefore violated the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment. An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her body fluids, the argument went, according to David Evans, a well-known authority on drug testing, who has written on drug testing for the Society of Human Resource Management.

While the courts at first agreed with such arguments, finding that random testing required a compelling need, the tide soon reversed. Private and federal government workplace drug testing programs have been upheld in hundreds of cases. The United States Supreme Court has considered several cases on this issue, and has supported drug testing in many cases.

Employers had won the legal war created by drug testing, Evans declared.

In recent years, groups have revisited the data suggesting massive productivity loss due to drug use. The American Civil Liberties Union, which has long taken the stance that pre-hire testing is tantamount to unreasonable search and seizure, changed its approach last year, releasing a controversial report that contended that drug testing is a bad investment for companies. Previous cost analyses, according to the ACLU report, were based on fuzzy math.

According to the ACLU, several organizations, including the United States Post Office, have attempted to measure the relationship between drug testing and job performance by testing all applicants, hiring even those who failed, and then evaluating their job performance. These studies, published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, revealed little to no relationship between drug test results and future job performance.

A more recent study by two economics professors at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY looked at a sample of 63 computer equipment and software firms. The study found that those firms with drug-testing programs had lower levels of productivity than companies without testing.

Collins says neither new productivity research nor evidence of cheating will likely convince companies to abandon pre-employment drug testing. The decision to test has always been "more about politics and values than results."

"Companies will set up policies on the basis of values and the attitudes of the top management," says Collins, who serves on the Workplace Health & Safety Committee of the Society for Human Resource Management. "In that sense, it's done for political reasons that may or may not be connected to compelling business research. There is significant emotional and moral baggage attached to it."

No help for the abusers

A greater danger, he says, is that more and more companies look to pre-employment testing as a "a magic bullet" that will prevent them from hiring substance abusers. Collins charges that many companies, relying on drug tests to screen out problem employees, have scaled back on employee assistance programs (EAP) designed to help drug users and alcoholics.

In the past, he says, EAP counselors had strong relationships with human resources departments. Managers were better-trained to recognize the signs of serious drug abuse or alcoholism.

The connection was lost, he says, because for the past decade most large companies cut costs by removing their EAP programs from their campuses and took them off-site. In his study of Fortune 500 companies, Collins found that businesses with EAPs on the premises at least a few hours per week were 500 percent more likely to refer employees to help programs.

While fewer employees are now being referred to programs to help them break their substance abuse habits, there are no fewer drunks or drug abusers in the workforce. A recent poll of American households found that 7.6 percent of employees in 1998 acknowledge using illegal drugs in the last 30 days, he says.

"From the employers' side, if you think your testing program is all that you need to do to address the issue of substance abuse in the workplace, you're dead wrong," he says. "That's not to say [pre-hire] testing has had no effect, but it has far less impact than I think most employers realize."