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Drug Testing

Field Tests for Identifying Drugs Are Proven Wildly Inaccurate


This is simply jawdropping:



The results of the study are available in the MPP-funded report False Positives Equal False Justice.

This research has quite far-reaching implications when you consider the massive number of drug arrests performed each year based on the results of these inaccurate field tests. With nearly a million marijuana arrests in the U.S. every year, the number of people convicted of marijuana possession who never actually had marijuana is certainly much larger than zero. I'd also like to know what other countries use these tests and what procedures exist to confirm the results before suspects are charged and sentenced.

It's a powerfully disturbing development and yet another reminder that nothing in the war on drugs is what it seems. When you pull back the curtain, every stage in the drug prohibition process is exposed as utterly fraudulent and perverted. Literally nothing that happens in the war on drugs is reliably correct.

I wouldn't have though it possible…but if we can't even trust police to accurately identify the drugs they're arresting people for, the drug war is somehow even more shockingly stupid and unfair than I thought.

Random Drug Testing Won’t Save the Children From Heroin

Here’s drug czar John Walters shamelessly using a young woman’s death as an opportunity to plug student drug testing:

Heroin killed 19-year-old Alicia Lannes, and her parents say she got the drug from a boyfriend.  Experts say that's how most young kids get introduced to drugs: by friends or relatives.
…
While teen drug use is declining, Walters says a Fairfax County heroin ring busted in connection with Lannes' death proves it's still a problem.  He supports a federal program used in more than 4,000 schools to randomly drug test students.

"There's no question in my mind had this young woman been in a school, middle school or high school with random testing," said Walters, "She would not be dead today." [FOX DC]

Walters sounds supremely confident, as usual, yet the reality is that random drug testing is often impotent when it comes to discovering heroin use. Student drug testing programs typically rely on urine tests, which can only detect heroin for 3-4 days after use. Only marijuana -- which stays in your system for up to a month – can be effectively detected this way. Thus, random testing actually incentivizes students to experiment with more dangerous drugs like heroin that increase your chances of passing a drug test.


And thanks to the complete failure of the drug war, heroin is stronger today than ever before:

The drug enforcement agency says the purity of heroin found in Virginia is typically higher than usual—making it more deadly.

"They tend not to know how to gauge the strength and they usually take more than they need to," said Patrick McConnel, who oversees Treatment for Youth Services Administration Alcohol and Drug Services.

There are no easy answers here, to be sure, and I don’t claim any monopoly on the solutions to youth drug abuse. But I guarantee you that the problem isn’t our failure to collect more urine from young people. As long as the most dangerous substances continue to be manufactured, distributed, and controlled by criminals, the face of our drug problem will remain the same.

Wow, I almost forgot it was Drug Free Work Week

Fortunately, the drug czar remembered, which makes sense because it’s his third favorite drug war theme-week. And having burdened us with this annoying ritual, he goes on to explain unintentionally how unbelievably unimportant it is:

October 20-26th is Drug Free Work Week

Every year, the Department of Labor sponsors a Drug Free Work Week to raise awareness of the consequences of drug use on the workplace.  According to recent research this is a serious problem:

•    75 percent of the nation’s current illegal drug users are employed—and 3.1 percent say they have actually used illegal drugs before or during work hours.

That means 97% of drug users don’t go to work high. Seriously, these numbers show that the overwhelming majority of drug users have jobs and scrupulously avoid drugs on workdays. That’s not a problem, that’s awesome.

And it goes to show how completely nuts you are if you think we have to drug test everybody to keep them from spilling bong water in the copier. Even at my office – where we oppose drug testing and advocate drug legalization – we’ll still throw you the hell out if you come in drooling and screwing around. If there’s ever been a solution in search of a problem, it’s the little plastic cup that proves you smoked pot at some point in the past month.

Unfortunately, in the drug war, we always do things the hard way and that’s why the federal government would rather prosecute purveyors of prosthetic piss-test penises than admit that anyone with half a brain shouldn’t need laboratory results to identify the dumbass in the department.

Meanwhile, Joe Sixpack, the very epitome of traditional American values, is far more likely to mix business with pleasure than the average illegal drug user:
•   79 percent of the nation’s heavy alcohol users are employed—and 7.1 percent say they have actually consumed alcohol during the workday.
But nobody drug tests for that, so the workplace drug testing tyranny tinkles on, untethered by the towering absurdity of busting employees for smoking pot over the weekend, while vastly larger numbers get drunk on their lunch break with impunity. The whole thing is such a monument of stupidity and craziness, I suppose it’s fitting that the drug czar must set aside a whole week each year to bask in it.

Punk Rock Bonus: Here’s NOFX with "Go To Work Wasted"

Drug Testing Advocate Gets Busted For Drugs

A dimebag of heroin - $10
A urine test - $30
A drug testing advocate busted for heroin distribution – priceless hilarious

NORWALK, Ohio — A northern Ohio woman who encouraged Norwalk school board members to start drug testing students has been indicted on charges of heroin trafficking.

Police in Norwalk say Stephanie Broz admitted to them that her advocacy of drug testing was to take attention away from her. Norwalk Detective Todd Temple says she told police it was a scam.

Broz also faces a charge of possession of heroin.

Police arrested her in early June during a traffic stop. Officers say they found her with a large amount of heroin. [Columbus Dispatch]

Of course, it's tempting to now suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that proponents of drug testing around the country are all a bunch of closeted crooks and perverts diverting attention from their own misdeeds by calling on us to collect bodily fluids from children. I bet at least one person won't even read this whole post before ironically suggesting in the comment section that we start drug testing the drug testers.

Yet, it makes no more sense to arbitrarily scrutinize them than anyone else. Few crimes they commit could do more harm than the one taking place before our eyes: stealing money from our children's education to be spent on worthless programs that don't effectively prove or disprove drug use and encourage use of more-dangerous less-detectible drugs.

Drug testing is generally only effective against marijuana anyway, so dealers of cocaine, heroin, and meth have every reason to support it.

Drug Testing Pregnant Women Produces False Positives (And Kills Babies)

A major and underappreciated problem with drug testing is that the stupid tests don’t even work. They say people took drugs when they didn’t. The problem is particularly apparent in the case of pregnant women who are frequently targeted for drug screening, but whose changing body chemistry throws off the results:

Hospitals' initial urine- screening drug tests on pregnant women can produce a high rate of false positives - particularly for methamphetamine and opiates - because they are technically complex and interpretation of the results can be difficult, some experts say.

Tests for methamphetamine are wrong an average of 26 percent - and possibly up to 70 percent - of the time, according to studies by the University of Kansas Medical Center, U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. [DailyNews]

Of course, drug policy and science cannot coexist harmoniously, thus babies are taken from mothers who test positive, even though the tests are constantly wrong. In one tragic case, a child died in foster care after being wrongly separated from her mother:

Growing up in Los Angeles County's foster care system, Elizabeth Espinoza is sure of one thing: A baby needs its mother.

Espinoza, who was separated from her own mother when she was young because of neglect, also had her newborn baby taken by the foster-care system when she tested positive for marijuana and cocaine at the hospital after giving birth.

Just three months later, the baby, Gerardo, died when his foster mother strapped him into a car seat, took him to a neighbor's home and left him in the car seat on a bed, according to a lawsuit filed against the county's Department of Children and Family Services seeking unspecified damages. [DailyNews]

I hope I'm not being generous, but I really think almost anyone would agree that this is just sickening and horrible. The press coverage will hopefully initiate progress towards cleaning up the procedures that contributed to this travesty. I will hold out hope that common sense can prevail over the mindlessness of taking children from their parents based on evidence that is proven to be wrong up to 70% of the time, particularly now that the alternatives we have available for those children have been demonstrated to be fatally inadequate.

But there is also a larger lesson here that must not escape our attention. Think for a moment about how many women have already been falsely accused under this wildly unjust policy. Think about the social consequences of tearing families apart based on deeply flawed science in a criminal justice system that strikes without hesitation but drags its heels when it comes to righting such ubiquitous wrongs. Ask yourself, also, how such a policy was ever implemented in the first place, doomed as it was to destroy innocent families so capriciously.

Once again, we are faced with a monumental travesty, grand in scope, yet remarkably simple in origin; we should protect unborn children from drug-using mothers. We've wreaked unimaginable and undue suffering upon innocent parents and children in pursuit of the noblest of ideals. That, unfortunately, is the story of most aspects of our drug policy when they receive appropriate scrutiny. The totality of such repeated travesties forms a terrifying mosaic, the true, yet largely untold story of how our drug policies destroy innocent lives each and every day in ways we might never expect.

It is precisely because the idea to protect babies from drugs is such a no-brainer that a plan was drafted with no brains.

They're Drug Testing Our Sewage

I'll spare you the excrement jokes and just let this idea speak for itself:
Environmental scientists are beginning to use an unsavory new tool -- raw sewage -- to paint an accurate portrait of drug abuse in communities. Like one big, citywide urinalysis, tests at municipal sewage plants in many areas of the United States and Europe, including Los Angeles County, have detected illicit drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana.

Law enforcement officials have long sought a way to come up with reliable and verifiable calculations of narcotics use, to identify new trends and formulate policies. Surveys, the backbone of drug-use estimates, are only as reliable as the people who answer them. But sewage does not lie. [Los Angeles Times]

Admittedly, assuming the methodology is sound, this appears to be a breakthrough technique for obtaining accurate drug use demographics. And it's already beginning to cast doubt on existing data, not surprisingly to the effect of indicating that drug use has been widely underreported:

The scientists were even able to use sewage to estimate individual use and weekly trends. For instance, they estimated that people in Milan used twice as much cocaine, about 35 grams per person per year, than Italy's government surveys had suggested.

That's kind of neat, I suppose, that they can figure out stuff like that. But ya know what? If our drug policy weren't a raging nightmare, drug testing raw sewage wouldn’t be even remotely necessary. Seriously, the moment the government finds itself digging around in our sewage to figure out what drugs we take, it becomes completely clear that we've screwed up our approach to drugs beyond belief. It shouldn’t even be necessary to formulate arguments as to why this is not the behavior of a healthy society. I mean, really. They're drug testing sewage. What's wrong with them?

All of this is symbolic of the utter lack of information and knowledge about drug use that we've achieved in the course of our abundantly destructive attempts to control this very behavior. Nothing could be easier than determining down to the bottle or butt exactly how many Heinekens™ or Newport Lights™ are consumed by the population, but in order to study marijuana use, we must collect frothing f#%king sewage into test tubes, mix in some noxious chemicals, and run the results through some mindbendingly complex algorithm?

Clueless and reeking of poo, the champions of our failed drug control crusade stand before us straight-faced and swear that everything is going according to plan.

Drug Tests Are Useless Devices That Don’t Even Work at Detecting Drugs

The Drug Czar's blog was very excited on Friday. Why? Because a school in Florida drug tested 120 students and all of them passed!

"It worked out very positively," [the principal] said this afternoon. "We did not have a single student test positive, out of 120 students we tested."

Random meant random, she said. Tests were done unannounced at different times during different days of the week. Some students were tested more than once, just because of the randomness of it all, she said. [Tampa Bay Online]
Admittedly, a random sample of 120 students testing negative for drugs is a surprising result. So surprising, in fact, that one begins to wonder how the hell it happened. Well the answer is simple: according to Tampa Bay Online, they used saliva tests, which are practically useless.

Via wikipedia, here are the estimated detection times for saliva drug testing:

So, basically, all 120 of these students could have been smoking hash and crack all night on Friday and still passed their drug tests on Monday when they got to school. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying that testing students' saliva doesn't prove whether or not they use drugs. That's not how it works, and any newspaper article purporting to celebrate the effectiveness of such a program ought to disclose that fact, lest it should become yet another arm in the Drug Czar's nationwide campaign to randomly collect bodily fluids from our children.

Drug Czars Say the Darndest Things

Deputy Drug Czar Bertha Madras delivered this gem in Colorado as she promoted random student drug testing to school administrators:

"We are not waging a war on drugs; we are waging a war of defense --
a defense of the basis of humanity, and that is our brain," said Dr.
Bertha Madras, the White House deputy drug czar in charge of reducing
demand for drugs. [Denver Post]


This is the same woman who argued against distributing overdose prevention kits, claiming that overdoses would teach people not to use heroin. So no, she's actually not very interested in "defense" against the harms of drugs.

She supports drug testing programs that don’t work, but opposes overdose prevention programs that do. Her ideas would make considerably more sense if her job were to make the drug problem worse.

Update: In comments, Giordano asks "Is Dr. Madras’ brain on the defensive?" Yes, I think that's exactly what's going on here.

Should Candidates For Public Office Be Drug Tested?

No, but it certainly is tempting to subject our political leaders to the same rampant privacy invasions endured by millions of Americans in the name of the war on drugs:
The S.C. Senate Judiciary Committee last week adopted a proposal that could result in a constitutional amendment requiring candidates to take a drug test before seeking public office. As tempting as it seems on the surface, lawmakers should analyze it carefully before they plow into it. There could be rocky ground ahead.

Many believe that if drug testing is employed widely in business, it should be employed in the government, too. What is good for private citizens should be good for elected officials. The goal is to eliminate the use of illegal drugs from the workplace, where a variety of harms might arise. [Beaufort Gazette]
Ok, I understand that people believe that, but why candidates specifically? Is there any evidence of party-prone politicians bumping blow on the public dime?
The proposal's origin started when former S.C. Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted for possession of cocaine. He awaits sentencing, but shortly after the arrest, he checked into a rehabilitation facility. South Carolinians were embarrassed, and rightly so.

South Carolinians have dealt with tarnished images before. In 1903, Lt. Gov. James Tillman shot and killed N.G. Gonzales, a co-founder of The State newspaper, on Main Street in Columbia. Former Congressman John Jenrette was convicted in Abscam. Many S.C. lawmakers were indicted in Operation Lost Trust. S.C.'s agriculture commissioner was arrested for taking at least $20,000 to protect illegal cock fighting.
Cocaine! Murder! Bribery! Cockfighting! What do all these things have in common? You can't prevent them with drug testing. And yes, that includes cocaine, which only stays in your system for a couple days.

Just pause for one moment and contemplate the collective stupidity of all this. Aside from these presumably non-drug related cock-fighting scandals and whatnot, this pretty much comes down to one guy doing some coke and now everyone wants to drug test candidates for public office even though anyone can blast rails of coke all weekend and just declare their candidacy on a Wednesday.

Once again, the popularity of drug testing thrives on the failure of its proponents to comprehend basic facts about how drug testing works. I'd propose the creation of some sort of website to provide that information, but there are already 12 million of those. And, of course, if anyone on South Carolina's Senate Judiciary Committee comes forth to point out that drug testing isn't really very effective against cocaine to begin with, they inevitably render themselves susceptible to accusations of cocaine use and possibly even cock-fighting.
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