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Drug tests are administered in a variety of everyday contexts
-- especially in the job market. Here we discuss the subject
as it applies to the criminal justice system. Probably the
most common use of drug testing is for people who have been
placed on probation. Often people are required to submit to
drug tests even if the crime they were convicted for had
nothing to do with drugs.
Example: Jonah
was convicted of burglary. A probation report disclosed that
Jonah had a history of cocaine use. The court sentenced Jonah
to jail for a brief period, to be followed by a three-year
period of probation. One of the conditions of probation was
that Jonah submit to periodic and random drug testing.
Even assuming a good
reason for testing people on probation, the tests must be
reliable for testing to make sense. While the reliability of
the standard urine drug test is aggressively asserted by the
companies that make money off the testing, the tests, as
administered, are not scientifically assessed for reliability.
The legal community
has a term for procedures that pretend to be science but can't
stand up to scientific scrutiny: junk science. Some now claim
that drug testing is a perfect example of it.
One such soul is Dr.
Kent Holtorf, who gives plenty of ammunition for his views in
a book with the quirky title, Ur-ine Trouble, published by
Vandalay Press and now in its second edition. Holtorf begins
by pointing out the myriad ways in which drug testing
laboratories can and do make mistakes. Holtorf also deals with
an even more troubling aspect of drug testing: the false
positive. A false positive occurs when a test erroneously
indicates the presence of an illegal substance. For instance,
a test can come out positive for marijuana as the result of
ingesting ibuprofin, found in Advil and Motrin. A number of
over-the-counter medications may produce a positive test
result for amphetamines.
Holtorf claims that
more false positives than accurate tests are reported by drug
testing laboratories. He devotes an entire chapter to the
various substances that have been shown to cause false
positives for various substances.
Holtorf also points
out that secondhand smoke from marijuana and crack cocaine is
taken up in a person's hair, which produces a positive test
result when hair is sampled for drugs. The more melanin in a
person's hair, claims Holtorf, the greater the concentration
of the illegal substance. And since African-Americans tend to
have higher concentrations of melanin in their hair, the
chances are also great that they are at much greater risk than
whites of testing positive when their hair is tested -- even
if the substance got there through secondhand smoke. |
