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Drug Testing News |
By Marianne Costantinou
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
So, you're looking for a job, one of the zillion workers who got
the pink slip in recent months since the boom went bust. Or
you're a recent graduate, about to get a full-time job for the
first time. Or you're sick of your old job - the place has
gotten too corporate, management is starting job evaluations or
some other type of torture, you feel unappreciated and underpaid
- and you just want out.
So, you get your resume polished, hustle up some references and
head out into the proverbial job market with your proverbial hat
in hand. Better save the other hand for forking over an
all-too-real cup of urine. Yours.
Drug testing. It's here and it's big.
"Drug testing is by far the norm," says a proponent,
Mark A. de Bernardo, head of the Institute for a Drug-Free
Workplace in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit coalition of 120
major employers from across the country, and a director of San
Francisco's Littler Mendelson, an employment law firm that
claims to be the nation's biggest. "Anybody getting out of
high school and college or switching jobs should expect to be
drug tested."
"Many workers now do it without thinking twice," says
Ethan Nadelmann, head of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy
Foundation in New York City, which advocates for drug policy
reform, including an end to drug testing. "In some
respects, drug testing is rapidly becoming as much a national
tradition as mom and apple pie."
And if you don't pass the drug test - no matter how smart you
are, how hard- working, how experienced, how fab your
references, how downright likable you are - you won't get the
job.
That's true even here in so-called Mellow California and the
liberal Bay Area, historically in the vanguard when it comes to
drug experimentation and tolerance, both culturally and legally.
If anything, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in May that
reaffirmed the illegality of pot - even the medicinal marijuana
that was championed in the state's Proposition 215 - shows how
strong the anti-drug sentiment still is in the country.
Little wonder, then, that drug testing has become part of the
typical job application, with millions of wannabe workers tested
each year. Most often it's a urine test, but even strands of
hair, a few drops of saliva, a vial of blood or a week's worth
of sweat on a skin patch are being demanded to check for drugs
in your system, from pot to the hard stuff.
The trend, now in its 15th year, has spawned a $5.9 -billion
industry in drug-testing labs, a burgeoning underground economy
in guerrilla counter-labs and mom-and- pop Web sites that peddle
products that swear to fake-out the tests, some two-dozen state
laws, and a slew of court cases challenging the drug-test habit
on privacy and Fourth Amendment issues.
What happened?
One Cup at a Time
At first, only the military did drug testing, and civilians were
pretty much spared the need to pee in a cup to impress the boss.
But then along came President Ronald Reagan and all that 1980s
chatter to "Just Say No." Middle America was snorting
coke up the ying-yang, drug hysteria was in full swing and the
War on Drugs was turning into another Vietnam. Enter Reagan's
Executive Order 12564, which made drug abstinence - on and
off-duty - a condition of federal employment. Reagan's rule set
guidelines for drug-testing programs. The Pandora's Box was now
officially open. The war on drugs was gonna be fought on the
home front, in corporate bathrooms, one pee cup at a time.
It wasn't long before everyone was jumping on the bandwagon. In
1988, Congress passed the Drug Free Workplace Act, which said
that any company that wanted a lucrative federal contract had
better test its workers for drugs. States dangled similar
carrots. A few years later, in 1991, Congress got into the
drug-testing act again, requiring drug tests - including random
tests - for anybody in safety-sensitive positions, like airline
pilots, truck drivers, train and bus conductors. Meanwhile, the
drug-testing craze spread into other sectors. School athletes,
welfare recipients, folks on probation or parole - the kinds of
people authority figures wanted to keep tabs on - were suddenly
being ordered to take drug tests to maintain their privileges.
But by far, the widest spread was in the private work sector,
especially as a condition of getting hired. In the first decade
since Reagan's order, drug testing was up 277 percent, says the
American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the practice.
Though top executives typically get to bypass that step in the
job interview, companies that require drug testing usually
require it of everyone else who wants to work there, according
to experts, whether blue- collar or white-collar. That means
assembly-line workers and secretaries. Computer analysts and
bankers. Salesclerks and even the guy bagging groceries at the
neighborhood supermarket.
These days, companies that test for drugs are a who's who of big
business in every industry. General Motors tests for drugs. So
does Bank of America, at least sometimes. Intel. Wal-Mart.
Anheuser-Busch. Safeway. The San Francisco Chronicle. Home Depot
and Ikea even have signs on their doors trumpeting that they
have a drug-free workplace.
At first, drug testing caused a stir, with civil rights
advocates and labor unions and editorials lambasting the
perceived invasion of privacy. Lawsuits led to court cases and,
in some states, some legislative curbs. In California, the State
Supreme Court has frowned on drug testing on current employees,
either as random tests or as requirements for job promotions. In
1986, San Francisco became the nation's first city to ban random
testing outright. But across the state, including San Francisco,
workers in safety-sensitive jobs like transportation are still
subjected to the random testing required in the federal
Department of Transportation guidelines. And there's no
statewide or city ban on testing prospective hires, the belief
being that the applicant has the freedom to choose not to apply
for the job.
But even with some legal curbs, drug testing has still quietly
mushroomed.
All told, 67 percent of the nation's largest companies test
their employees or applicants for drugs, according to a 2001
survey by the American Management Association, a New York
consulting firm that claims to have 7,000 corporate clients
representing one-fourth of the U.S. workforce. And though the
percentage of companies who test is down from its peak - 81
percent in 1996 - it still means that each year, millions of
workers are giving more than just their best effort to the job.
Poppy Bagels Not an Excuse
The result is that drug testing is big business. Just one
drug-testing company, SmithKline Beecham, now called
GlaxoSmithKline, did 24 million drug tests in a decade, from
1988 to 1998, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Though one of the nation's largest labs, they're hardly alone in
what Standard & Poor's values as a $5.9 billion industry.
The Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA),
based in Washington D.C., has 1,100 members, including drug
labs, collection facilities and equipment makers. And its
membership roster, says its executive director, Laura Norfolk,
"is just the tip of the iceberg."
Two firms - PharmChem, a giant urine-testing lab which was based
in Menlo Park until June, when it relocated to Texas, and
Psychemedics, the nation's leading hair-testing facility, based
in Culver City (Los Angeles County) - alone do $60 million in
business.
Urine tests, the most popular, cost an average of $20 to $25 per
sample. Hair, the latest fad because it can track a longer
history of drug use, costs about $50.
Even drug-test opponents admit that the technology these days
makes a false positive reading rare. Gone are the days when a
test positive for heroin, for example, could theoretically be
blamed on eating a couple of poppy seed bagels.
At the minimum, each sample is tested for what is called the Big
Five: pot, cocaine (including crack), methamphetamines
(including its cousins, amphetamines and Ecstasy), PCP (also
known as angel dust), and opiates (like heroin and morphine).
Employers don't usually ask for the sample to be tested for
prescription drugs, drug labs say. They also don't typically
screen for alcohol or cigarette use, since they are legal.
A urine test can detect the residue, called metabolites, of
hard-core drugs up to about 72 hours after use, but heavy pot
users are usually tagged with the telltale THC chemical in their
system for as much as three to four weeks. That means pot users
are more likely to get caught than hard-core heroin or cocaine
addicts.
With hair tests, drug labs claim that the hair shafts of a
60-strand, 1.5- inch sample that's snipped close to the scalp
can trace drug use going back three months. And in case the job
applicant is bald or decides to get a crew cut before the drug
test, the hair can be snipped from another part of the body. And
that doesn't mean your knuckles.
Because false positives can't be counted on, wannabe workers who
do drugs try to outfox the tests. The most common way is to quit
the drugs cold turkey as soon as they know they're facing a drug
test, and then drink gallons and gallons of water for days
before the test, hoping to flush the metabolites from their
system. But many turn to a slew of companies they find
advertised in High Times magazine or on the Internet. Each
company claims to sell just the right product that will come to
the rescue and help land that job.
With hilarious names and Web sites - www. urineluck.com,
www.testingclean. com, www.passyourdrugtest.com, www.ezklean.com
- these companies sell adulterants such as nitrites and bleach,
diuretics, synthetic urine, chemically treated shampoos, herbal
concoctions and a slew of other products.
Naturally, drug testing labs pooh-pooh the saboteurs' claims.
But that still doesn't stop them from checking out High Times
and scouring the Internet, and buying the products to test them
out in their labs - just in case.
"You look at High Times when you want to know what the
other side's thinking," says Ray Kelly, an Oakland forensic
toxicologist who for seven years ran the urine and hair testing
lab at Associate Pathologists Laboratories in Las Vegas.
"In the chess game of drug testing, when they make a move,
we have to respond to a move."
"We change and improve our formulas every six to 12 months
to stay ahead of the labs," says Kevin Pressler, marketing
manager of Cincinnati's urineluck. com, whose 10 products each
sell for $32. "It's an inevitable cat-and-mouse game."
Counter-labs like urineluck.com have to keep changing their
secret ingredients because once the drug labs spot them, they
test for the new chemicals. Alas for the worker wannabe if
adulterants or any sign of tampering is found in the sample:
Drug labs say they automatically mark the sample as coming up
positive for drugs - even if the only evidence is the attempted
camouflage.
Good for America
Against this backdrop, two surveys suggest it's all much ado
about nothing. For starters, the National Academy of Sciences
concluded in 1994, after a three-year study, that there was no
scientific evidence that drug tests ensure safety and
productivity on the job. Secondly, companies who test for drugs
seem to be going on blind faith that the tests live up to their
goals. In 1996, the American Management Association, a
pro-employer group, asked if companies had any "statistical
evidence" that drug tests had an effect on accidents,
illness, disability claims, theft or violence. Only 8 percent of
the companies with drug-testing programs had done any
cost-benefit analysis to see if their own programs worked.
One Silicon Valley company that did follow up was
Hewlett-Packard. The Palo Alto computer and office equipment
company tested applicants for a decade, from 1990 till last
year, says Randy Lane, a spokesman. But so few applicants tested
positive, he says, that the company dropped the policy as not
being worth the cost.
Hewlett-Packard started drug testing because, says Lane,
"Essentially, all of our competitors were doing it."
That's a big reason companies do adopt drug testing policies,
says de Bernardo, and why they should. Companies don't want drug
abuser rejects, he says, who couldn't get jobs elsewhere.
It's no surprise that the folks whose business is drug testing
claim that drug testing is good for companies, good for workers,
good for America.
"Employers have the single most effective weapon in the war
on drugs: the paycheck," says de Bernardo. "It's a
ripple effect. It's a success story as far as the community is
concerned . We want a drug-free society."
But improving society is not the major corporate agenda behind
drug testing, proponents admit. It's money. They claim that
employee drug use costs companies big money, in loss of
productivity and safety, in absenteeism, and in health and
insurance costs, even when the drug use is marijuana at home on
the weekends. The danger of marijuana use is that it's a gateway
to harder drugs, says de Bernardo. Though most pot users don't
graduate to harder drugs, he says, folks don't usually do heroin
and cocaine without first doing pot.
"Some people don't go through that gate, some do. ...For
some people, it will progress from Saturday night to midweek to
more serious drugs," he says.
What's more, he and others add, even marijuana use is illegal,
and companies have the right to know if an applicant or employee
is engaged in illegal activity.
"Any illegal drug use is illegal" says Bill Thistle,
general counsel for Psychemedics. "I think an employer has
the right to expect you not to engage in felony behavior (even)
on the weekend."
Actually, marijuana use is a misdemeanor. And in San Francisco,
District Terence Hallinan has said repeatedly over the years
that his office wouldn't prosecute anyone for smoking pot.
Big Business as Big Brother
On the flip side, drug testing has sent groups involved in civil
rights and drug policy reform into a tizzy. To them, drug
testing smacks of Big Business posing as Big Brother poking
around in private lives.
"There's no end to that, the employer being a
policeman," says Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco civil
rights and employment lawyer who wrote the city's ordinance
banning random testing. "It's the most intrusive search, to
literally penetrate your body fluids, search your chemistry, and
determine what you have ingested."
If someone shows up at work clearly stoned, then test that one
person, he and other drug-test opponents say. But don't suspect
everyone by making everyone get tested. That's like having cops
search everyone's home just in case there's a criminal - which
goes to the heart of the Fourth Amendment's protection against
unreasonable searches, albeit by government.
"Privacy is an important issue. To us, it's
fundamental," says Lewis Maltby, head of the National
Workrights Institute, a research and advocacy group on workplace
issues based in Princeton, N.J., and the former director of the
ACLU National Task Force on Civil Liberties in the Workplace.
"You don't search someone's body and personal life unless
you have some grounds to think they've done something
wrong" .
"Has anyone ever heard of reference checks? Wouldn't that
tell you more about their work habits than having them pee in a
bottle?"
What's more, opponents add, drug tests don't distinguish between
the occasional and the habitual user. A drug test shows only the
residue of drugs that have been taken in the past three days to
a month, not which drugs are actively in the person's system at
the time of the test. So if companies are worried about safety
and productivity, says Palefsky, they should be giving
impairment tests - simple computer video games that gauge such
things as eye- hand coordination, reflexes and concentration -
each day they show up for work, not drug tests before they get
hired.
"Drug tests for public safety is a fallacy," he says.
"Impairment tests test for safety."
Besides, drug test opponents add, other personal problems can
explain poor worker performance: fatigue, marital woes, shaky
finances, watching "I Love Lucy" reruns at 3 a.m. -
and hangovers from drinking. If employers can check if workers
are using drugs after hours, civil rights advocates say, what
other areas of personal lives can they investigate?
Rules and Procedures
Even toxicologists and others involved in drug testing voice
concern.
Janet Weiss, a medical toxicologist at the University of
California at San Francisco who does drug-testing consultations
for companies, the courts and government agencies, says she's
opposed to drug testing in the workplace because "They
don't do what they're supposed to do." Studies haven't
shown that testing improves productivity or saves employers
money, she says. And she finds drug testing
"demeaning."
"What it patently means is that the employer doesn't want
`the wrong element' contaminating his/her workplace," she
says, in an e-mail, "and you have to 'prove' you are
innocent of using drugs."
Carolina Da Valle spent several years at a San Francisco medical
clinic where job applicants would go to give urine samples. Her
job was to set up the procedures for them to follow.
"I found it dehumanizing and humiliating to witness
individuals having to urinate in a cup - knowing a nurse was
standing an inch outside the door and listening to every drop of
urine fall into the cup..." she says in an e-mail.
"The guilty ones were easy to spot: very nervous, in a
hurry, usually with an almost ready-to-burst bladder due to
excessive water drinking in the hopes of passing a surely
positive drug screen off as a negative one."
The procedures at medical clinics and other collection
facilities usually follow the strict guidelines set up by the
federal Department of Transportation. Halle Weingarten, a
forensic toxicologist who is one of the owners of Independent
Toxicology Services in San Jose, spent 19 years as the chief
forensic toxicologist at the Santa Clara crime lab. She says
there are more rules and paperwork involved in handling a cup of
urine than just about any evidence that came through her old
police crime lab.
In drug testing, the big concern is called Chain of Custody, she
says, meaning that, "You want to make sure the sample
that's tested is the sample that came from John Doe."
As soon as the worker comes into her clinic, she checks their
photo ID. A form is filled out with five multicarbon copies,
with the worker's name, address, Social Security number, date,
time and the name of the lab technician, known officially as the
Collector. The worker is asked to remove his outer garments like
jackets and coats, and leave his bags outside the bathroom. He
then follows her in, and washes his hands in front of her. She
next prepares the bathroom: she removes the soap so it can't be
added to the urine to adulterate it; she tapes shut the water
faucets and adds a blue chemical to the toilet bowl so water
can't be added to the urine to dilute it. She then picks up a
plastic opaque cup with a rim that's 3 inches wide. The cup is
sealed with a lid. She opens it in front of the worker, hands
him the cup, and warns him not to turn on the faucet or flush
the toilet until she gives him permission. The worker then goes
into the bathroom. She stands outside the door.
As soon as he comes back out with the cup, now filled with
urine, she checks the faucets and toilet to make sure they
haven't been used. She then checks the outside of the cup. There
is a thermometer strip on it that goes from 90 to 100 degrees.
The urine in the cup must be body temperature. If it is, the
thermometer strip has a brightly colored spot. She checks for
the spot, and notes it on the paperwork. Then, as the worker
bears witness, she transfers the urine into two vials of about
an ounce each. She adds a tamper- proof seal to each vial,
initials them, dates them and asks the worker to sign each one.
The vials then go in a sealed pouch, with the paperwork attached
in an outside pocket in case of spillage. The worker is now
allowed to go back in the bathroom to wash up and flush the
toilet. Signed and sealed, the package of vials need to be
delivered overnight to a drug testing lab like PharmChem or
Psychemedics. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.
Most who come in seem resigned to it, she says.
"It's a fact of life," she says. "It's the way
things are."
A Matter of Principle
Still, though resigned, workers aren't exactly turning
cartwheels about drug tests. Drug users are understandably
reluctant to take a drug test and risk losing out on a job,
especially in these days of massive layoffs and hiring freezes.
But even those who claim not to do drugs say they're opposed to
the test on principle.
Lowell Moorcroft, an Oakland man who is in his 50s, says he was
stunned recently when asked to sign a document agreeing to be
tested for drugs when he applied for a data analyst job at a
major HMO. It was the first time he's been asked in 30 years of
work. He refused to sign, he says, because he was offended.
"It has nothing to do with the job, which is intellectual,
professional and sedentary," he says in an e-mail. "It
is invasive, demeaning, inegalitarian (i. e., are executives
tested?)."
James Weissman, 44, a computer programmer who lives in Mountain
View, has been asked to take a drug test only once in some
20-plus years and some 15 jobs. The request was in 1991, for a
small data analysis company. He was out of work at the time and
wanted the job, but he squawked when the drug test requirement
was sprung on him at the end of the job interview. It was, he
recalls, "Oh, one more thing," resume is great, you're
great, we just need you to pee in a cup.
"I said `You've got to be kidding. I'm not operating heavy
equipment here. I'm operating a computer,' " Weissman told
the job interviewer.
To Weissman, asking him to pee in a cup was like the company
telling him it didn't trust him - even though he says he gave
his word that he didn't do drugs.
Weissman demanded to speak to the human resources director,
hoping he could reason with him. What he found most maddening
about the conversation, he says, was the director's inability to
explain why the drug test was required other than the fact that
it was company policy. To Weissman, it was like a parent telling
a kid he had to do something "Because."
"This was very anti-worker," he says. "It was
`We're going to impose an arbitrary rule on you. And we're not
going to take your word for it.' If one person could justify it
to me, no problem. But `Well, it's our policy. `Well, look, it's
written down here' is not enough of an explanation. Why not
bowel cavity inspections? You have to draw the line. You do not
intrude, period."
Still, Weissman needed the job. He took the test, and the job.
"When push came to shove, I conceded," he says.
Drug Free in a Hurry
But for those who do drugs, it's more than principle that's at
stake. With a drug test looming, it's a crash course to get
clean.
Jason Everley, 30, a San Francisco computer consultant, says in
an e-mail he can't count how many drug tests he's passed, given
72 hours' notice. His secret: "Drink lots of water and eat
like a bird for three days. You'll end up pissing every
relevant, detectable chemical out of your system."
But for others, a drug test means panic. With a urine test,
metabolites for anything but pot will usually flush out of the
system within a few days of abstinence, drug labs say. But with
hair testing - the latest fad, with Psychemedics claiming 2,000
clients - drug use is harder to hide. Hair testing is
controversial, with opponents claiming the dark, coarse hair of
African Americans and many ethnic groups gives
disproportionately high readings.
Many who face a drug test turn to companies who pledge
get-clean-quick products. Urineluck.com not only sells Bake N
Shake (at the test, pee in a plastic bag, shake it up, pour it
in the cup, leaving the telltale drug toxins behind) and Urine
Luck (a urine adulterant which zaps the drugs in the cup), but
offers a chat room for folks to gripe and ask anxious questions.
Other Web sites post what they say are testimonials from working
stiffs who owe their jobs to the company's products.
High Times has a hot line, started in 1989, that claims it's
given 150,000 callers, at $1.95 a minute, recorded advice on how
to pass drug tests. Even Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman got into
the act, in his book titled "Steal This Urine Test,"
with instructions on how to smuggle a plastic bag into the
testing bathroom to substitute "clean" urine.
Hoffman's trick sounds a lot like The Whizzinator by Puck
Technology, whose Web site claims it was founded by ex-'60s
types. Perhaps the most famous of the guerrilla tactics, it's a
$150 undergarment with a "bladder," heat pack and
dehydrated synthetic urine. To get the fake piss in the cup,
there's a handy-dandy, 3.5 inch prosthetic penis that's worn,
the Web site says, "in front of your standard-issue"
one and that comes in your choice of white, Latino, black, tan
or brown. For women, the penis can be worn on the side to avoid
the telltale bulge.
Despite the humor of such products, many Web sites profess
sincerity. The folks at passyourdrugtest.com describe themselves
as "freedom fighters" who believe in "people's
rights to privacy" and that alternative lifestyles have
"little or nothing to do with contributions you can make to
work and society." To test their products - which include
the $169.99 Bi-Cleanse Complete hair- cleansing shampoo that
claims to get rid of toxins in hair shafts - the company says it
flies staff members to Amsterdam every five months to visit the
smoke shops, known as coffee shops, and get hard-core users to
volunteer to test the products. The products absolutely work,
they assure customers.
The drug labs love to mock the products - even as they keep tabs
on them.
"We purchase these products to see what they are,"
says Thistle of Psychemedics. "It's just nothing. Plain
shampoo. Repackaged shampoo. Prell. Water. Most of them are just
rip-offs.
"Who's going to complain? `Yeah, I was trying to beat the
test and they ripped me off.' ... We just get a chuckle out of
it."
Companies Are Bashful
Curiously, companies in the corporate mainstream act as if
they're being asked to pee in public when queried about their
testing policy. Hired mouthpieces get all bashful, citing the
indelicacy of discussing their human resources policies with
total strangers. It's just too private.
Apple, the computer company whose advertising campaign dares
folks to Think Different, declined to discuss the thinking
behind their drug testing policy - or even whether they had one.
"In general, we just don't, you know, talk publicly about
our human resources policy. Publicly we talk about our
products," Tamara Weil-Hearon, a spokeswoman for the
Cupertino company, says on a voice mail message.
"Unfortunately, we're not going to participate in the
story."
Chiron, the biotech giant that's quick to trumpet any success in
its research labs, was also demure about whether it turned the
urine or hair of prospective hires into lab experiments.
"We don't comment on our human resources policies,"
says John Gallagher, the media relations manager at the
Emeryville facility. "That's our answer."
Martin Forrest, his boss at Chiron, didn't return a call seeking
additional comment. Neither did Debra Lambert, national
spokeswoman for Safeway food stores, which is headquartered in
Pleasanton. A woman answering her phone - who identified herself
as "just the messenger" - relayed that yes, Safeway
did do drug tests but that no, beyond that, any explanation was
nobody's business but Safeway's.
Meanwhile, EBay, Oracle, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices,
Yahoo and Applied Materials, to name the biggies, blew off the
calls. Only Cisco (doesn't test), Sun Microsystems (doesn't
test), Intel (does test), The San Francisco Chronicle (does
test), Wells Fargo (doesn't test in Bay Area, does in other
cities), Bank of America (does test, but only sometimes) and
Hewlett- Packard (did test but stopped last year) responded.
Cisco just says it doesn't but didn't go into it in a voice mail
message from Steve Langdon, one of a flotilla of flaks at the
San Jose networking company. Sun Microsystems doesn't test, says
spokeswoman Diane Carlini, because it wouldn't jibe with the
culture and self-image of the Silicon Valley computer company.
No such self-image worries at Intel. Tracy Koon, director of
corporate affairs for the Santa Clara chipmaker, says in an
e-mail:
"Yes we do pre-employment drug testing. The goal of the
program is to bar the habitual abuser of illegal drugs from the
workplace. This is part of our ongoing commitment to maintaining
a drug-free workplace. We began our program in 1992, in strict
adherence to the fairness standards set forth by the Department
of Transportation."
Maintaining a drug-free workplace is the thinking behind its
testing of applicants, says Adrianne Cabanatuan, the recruitment
manager for The San Francisco Chronicle, which has been testing
most prospective hires for at least a decade, and began testing
wannabe reporters and editors in June 1996. "We try to
preserve a drug-free workplace," she says, "so that's
one step toward it."
Meanwhile, Wells Fargo bank feels it's able to maintain its goal
of a drug- free workplace without pre-employment testing in the
Bay Area and most of the rest of its realm. "For the most
part, we don't have any problems," says spokeswoman Donna
Uchida. "If we do, we deal with it on an individual
basis." The company does test, however, in Milwaukee and in
Oregon, she says, where it's the norm among major employers.
Its competitor, Bank of America, also tests selectively. The
company "reserves the right to drug test but I'd hate to
say we do it across the board," says spokeswoman Juliet
Don. The decision on whether to drug test the prospective hire
is subjective, based on, she says,"the role and
responsibility of the associate."
Note: The drug-testing industry is a multibillion dollar profit
center. And a giant weapon in the War on Drugs. So don't be
surprised if you have to pony up prior to your next job
interview.
Read
Our Reply Here!!
Marianne Costantinou is a
Magazine staff writer.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Author: Marianne Costantinou
Published: Sunday, August 12, 2001
Copyright: 2001 San Francisco Chronicle - Page 12
Contact: letters@sfchronicle.com
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
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About our Company |
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We have been
manufacturing and
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Do
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Permanent Cleansing |
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Return Policy |
Refunds
All requests for refund
must be received no
later than 30 days from
your order date. Nothing
will be refunded if the
package has been opened.
No exceptions!
All returns are subject
to a 25% processing and
handling fee.
No shipping refunds will
be granted due to
adverse weather
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Home Test Kits
Even though our Test
Kits are the best money
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most accurate drug
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market, we do not give
refunds on our Home Test
Kit results or give
replacements on products
because of them, they
are for informational
purposes only.
We suggest testing
yourself prior to your
real drug test to make
sure you are negative. |
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Product Guarantee |
Guarantee for Same day
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The same day products
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Failed Test Policy
We will need a copy of a
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positive report
with purchasers name or
I.D. number from a
certified Laboratory or
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purchase to obtain a
full refund.
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