From: [Brian Milner] at [brunel.ac.uk] (Brian D Milner)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Subject: Re: CANNABIS MAKES GOOD EMPLOYEES
Date: 12 Jul 1996 16:21:26 +0100
<[e--t--e] at [mtroyal.ab.ca]> wrote:
>Does anybody have any details on the Utah Power & Light Study
>that indicated cannabis users were promoted more often, were
>sick less and were generally better employees than non-cannabis
>users.
-----------------------------------------
From [philsm t h] at [teleport.com] Thu Aug 3 09:20:45 BST 1995
Newsgroups: alt.drugs.pot
Subject: M. consumers make better employees
Here's a classic anti-prohibition article I've never yet seen on Usenet or
the Web. You might find it useful in responding to claims that cannabis
consumers are pulling less than their full share. In particular, it suggests
that workers who tested positive for marijuana only: 1) cost less in health
insurance benefits; 2) had a higher than average rate of promotion; 3)
exhibited less absenteeism; and 4) were fired for cause less often than
workers who did not test positive. Since marijuana is the most common
illicit drug used by adults, and the one detected in up to 90 percent of all
"positive" drug tests (half of which are false), this fact has radical
implications for current public and employer policies.- Phil Smith
[This is reproduced without permission from the original magazine
article. Any typos are mine - please bring to my attention. All bullets,
brackets and elisions are verbatim. I’ve interjected one
clearly identified clarification and request for information. No
significant graphics accompanied
the article, originally published on pages 18 & 22.
March 1990 issue:
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
SCIENCE AND THE CITIZEN
Test Negative
A look at the "evidence"
justifying illicit-drug tests
More than eight million working Americans had their urine tested
for illegal drugs in 1989, and as many as 15 million will undergo such
testing this year, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse
(NIDA). The fraction of companies that subject employees or job
applicants to testing has jumped from 21 percent in 1986 to more than 50
percent last year, according to the American Management Association. The
trend seems likely to continue: a majority of the respondents to a recent
Gallup poll favored random drug testing of all workers.
What underlies the broad acceptance of a practice that
conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has called a "needless
indignity"? One factor may be the alarming statistics cited by testing
advocates to demonstrate the high costs of drug abuse. Examination of
some of these claims suggests they do not always accurately reflect the
research on which they are based. In fact, some of the data could be used
to "prove" that drug use has negligible or even beneficial effects.
Consider these examples.
α Last year President George Bush declared that "drug abuse among
American workers costs businesses anywhere from $60 billion to $100
billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism, drug-related accidents,
medical claims and theft." Variants of this statistic abound in
discussions about drug abuse and are commonly repeated without
qualification by the media. Yet all such claims derive from a single
study, one that "was based upon assumptions which need additional
validation," according to an assessment last year by NIDA, the chief
federal agency sponsoring research on substance abuse.
The study grew out of a survey of some 3,700 households by the
Research Triangle Institute (RTI) in 1982. The RTI group found that the
average reported income of households with at least one person who
admitted to having ever used marijuana daily (20 days or more in a 30-day
period) was 28 percent lower than the average reported income of
otherwise similar households. The RTI researchers defined that difference
in income as "loss due to marijuana use"; the total loss, when
extrapolated to the general population, came to $26 billion. The
researchers then added on the estimated costs of
drug-related crime, health problems and accidents to arrive at a grand
total of $47 billion for "costs to society of drug abuse." This figure -
"adjusted" to account for inflation and population increase - represents
the basis of Bush’s statement, according to Henrick J. Harwood, who
headed the RTI study and is now in the White House drug-policy office.
The RTI survey included questions on current drug use (at least
once within the past month). Yet according to Harwood there was no
significant difference between the income of households with current
users of any illegal drug - including marijuana, cocaine and heroin - and
the income of otherwise similar households. Does this mean that current
use of even hard drugs - as opposed to perhaps a single marijuana binge
in the distant past - does not lead to any "loss"? "You would be on safe
ground saying that," Harwood replies.
α Officials of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have testified before
Congress and at national conferences on drug abuse that employees who use
drugs are "3.6 times more likely to injure themselves or another person
in a workplace accident ... [and] five times more likely to file a
workers’ compensation claim." The pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche,
which is leading an anti-drug campaign among businesses (and has a big
share of the drug-testing market), also promulgates this claim in
"educational" literature.
In fact, the study on which the claim is based has "nothing to do
with [illegal] drug users," according to a 1988 article in the University
of Kansas Law Review by John P. Morgan of the City University of New York
Medical School. Morgan, an authority on drug testing, has traced the
Chamber of Commerce claim to an informal study by the Firestone Tire and
Rubber Company of employees undergoing treatment for alcoholism.
α In an interview with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, J. Michael Walsh, who heads
NIDA’s applied research division and is a strong supporter of workplace
testing, singled out two studies that he said showed drug users are more
likely to cause accidents, miss work and use health benefits. The studies
were done at two utilities: the Utah Power and Light Company and the
Georgia Power Company. The 12 workers in Utah and the 116 in Georgia who
served as the primary research subjects were tested "for cause": they had
either been involved in accidents, exhibited other "problem" behavior
(commonly, high absenteeism) or submitted to treatment for alcoholism or
drug abuse. Critics point out that it should not be terribly surprising
if these subjects exhibited the cited traits at a higher-than-average
rate.
What may be surprising is that, according to a report published
by NIDA last year, Utah Power and Light actually "spent $215 per employee
per year less on the drug abusers in health insurance benefits than on
the control group." Those who tested positive at Georgia Power had a
higher promotion rate than the company average. Moreover, Georgia workers
testing positive only for marijuana (about 35 percent of all positives)
exhibited absenteeism some 30 percent lower than average. Nationwide,
Morgan says, marijuana accounts for up to 90 percent of all positive
findings, both because it is by far the most widely used illegal drug and
because it persists in urine for up to a month (compared with two days
for most other drugs).
α Perhaps the study most publicized of late by testing proponents
involves employees of the U.S. Postal Service. The service tested 4,396
new hirees in 1987 and 1988 and - keeping the test results confidential
- tracked the performance of positives (9 percent of the total) and
negatives. By last September, the service reported, 15.4 percent of the
positives and 10.5 percent of the negatives had been fired; the positives
had also taken an average of six more sick days a year.
This study may be distorted by more subtle biases - related to
race, age or gender - than those displayed by the utility studies,
according to Theodore H. Rosen, a psychologist and a consultant on drug
testing. Indeed, Jacques L. Normand, who headed the study, acknowledges
that minority postal workers tested positive at a much higher rate than
nonminority workers and that previous studies have shown minorities to
have higher absenteeism. [1995 interjection: research since this article
first appeared has shown that the relatively high levels of melanin in
African-Americans is the cause of this problem. As I understand it,
when melanin breaks down in the liver, its metabolites register as
cannabanoids in most drug tests. But I'd much appreciate it if someone
could send me the actual studies and their sources -- Phil Smith]
Morgan points out, moreover, that the Postal Service study
(like all those cited above) has not been published in a peer-reviewed
journal. In fact, he says, only one study comparing the work of drug-test
positives and negatives has passed peer review. Last year, in the Journal
of General Internal Medicine, David C. Parish of the Mercer University
School of Medicine in Georgia reported on a study of 180 hospital
employees, 22 of whom had tested positive after being hired. Parish
examined supervisor evaluations and other indexes and found "no
difference between drug-positive and drug-negative employees" at the end
of one year. He noted, however, that 11 of the negatives had been fired
during that period and none of the positives.
α Proponents of testing often imply that drug use among workers is
growing. A Hoffman-La Roche brochure, for example, quotes Walsh
pronouncing that "the problem of drug abuse has become so widespread in
America that every company must assume that its employees will eventually
be faced with a substance abuse problem." Yet in 1989 NIDA reported
that illegal drug use has been decreasing for 10 years and that the
decline has accelerated over the last five years. From 1985 to 1988 the
number of current users (at least once in the last month) of marijuana
and cocaine dropped by 33 and 50 percent, respectively.
To be sure, a subset of this group of current users is
increasing: NIDA estimated that from 1985 to 1988 the number of people
using cocaine at least once a week rose from 647,000 to 862,000 and
daily users increased from 246,000 to 292,000. NIDA found that addiction
to cocaine (including "crack") is particularly severe among the
unemployed - who are beyond the reach of workplace testing.
Clearly, the U.S. has a drug-abuse problem. Could it be that
neither indiscriminate testing of workers - which could cost upward of
$500 million this year - nor the dissemination of alarmist information
by testing advocates is helping to resolve that problem?
-- John Horgan
(End)
------------------------------------------------------
Good enough for ya? :-)
--
==Brian Milner, The Computer Centre, Brunel University, West London, UK==
== MAD (m¾d) U.S. mutual assured destruction: a theory of nuclear ==
== deterrence whereby each side in a conflict has the capacity to ==
== destroy the other in retaliation for a nuclear attack. ==
== -from Collins English Dictionary '92/'93. ==
=WWW Home page - http://http2.brunel.ac.uk:8080/~ccusbdm/===We The Freed=