Workplace Drug Screening Opinion Paper

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Workplace Drug Screening Opinion Paper Carolyn Smith PSY425 September 27, 2011 Betsy Ferronato Workplace Drug Screening Opinion Paper With drugs becoming more prevalent in society today, more employers are taking to testing potential employment candidates before they hire them. Drug testing however, does show if the potential employee has a problem with alcohol. There are several different types of tests available in the market place to these employers. This paper will look at the different types of tests, types of drug programs and the legal and ethical implications of drug testing. First, we look at the types of drug test that are available today. There are five types of drug tests: urine, blood, hair, saliva, and sweat. According to Polzer (2010), urinalysis is the most common method of testing, largely due to its low cost and ease in administration, however, it has been called into question in recent years. A urine sample can be tampered with quite easily: for example, participants can drink large amounts of water to dilute their urine and drug metabolites (Polzer, 2010). Many companies use urine test because it is cheap and there are many lab available to do them. One problem is there is the possibility of lab error. If anyone deviates from the chain of custody, the drug test is discarded as a tainted specimen. Urine tests cannot determine when a drug was used they can only detect the “metabolites,” or inactive leftover traces of previously ingested substances (ACLU, 2011). In other words if you do drugs on the weekend and are tested in the middle of the week you can test positive. If you do drugs the same day you test it might come out negative, take cocaine, you can snort it in the morning and still come out negative later that morning when tested. One way to ensure that a urine test is accurate is to do a quantitative drug test in

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