California Norml Guide to Drug Testing

One of the most insidious intrusions on Americans' personal privacy and freedom in recent years has been the increasingly pervasive practice of urine testing. Since the introduction of federal drug testing regulations by the Reagan administration, Americans have more and more often been required to pee in a cup in order to prove their worthiness for employment, insurance, medical treatment, child custody, extracurricular activities in schools, workers' compensation, security clearance, participation in athletics, military service, and personal liberty from prison. Behind this practice lies the scientifically unwarranted assumption that a person's fitness can be determined by the chemistry of their urine or other bodily fluids, much like the fictional, crackpot Laputans satirized by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels. In fact, drug testing does not measure fitness or impairment, but rather the presence of certain drug residues that may have no deleterious effect at all. This is especially the case with marijuana, the most popular, safe, and medically useful illegal drug, whose presence is typically detectable for days or weeks after last use by urine testing, long after any impairing effects have faded. Ironically, urine testing is far more sensitive to marijuana than more dangerous drugs, such as opiates, amphetamines, and alcohol (which isn't even checked for in urine tests). Therefore drug testing can have the counterproductive effect of encouraging workers to move from marijuana to more dangerous, less detectable substances such as designer drugs, alcohol, and prescription narcotics, while at the same time depriving them of the medicinal benefits of cannabis. Moreover, of course, it subjects users and non-users alike to an obnoxious invasion of intimate bodily privacy.

Dale Gieringer has been the state director of California NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) since 1987 and is on the National NORML board of directors. Dr. Gieringer has published research on medical marijuana usage, marijuana smoke harm reduction, potency testing, and driving under the influence of marijuana. He has testified before the legislature and in court on issues concerning personal use of marijuana, and was on the advisory board for the California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at UC San Diego. He is the author of Marijuana Medical Handbook (Quick American 2008).