Pubdate: Thu, 18 Nov 1999
Source: Eye Magazine (CN ON)
Copyright: 1999 Eye Communications Ltd.
Contact:  471 Adelaide St. W., Toronto, ON, M5V 1T1 Canada
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Author: Nate Hendley

THIS IS YOUR GOVERNMENT ON DRUGS

The Tory Plan To Test Welfare Recipients For Drugs Is An Unworkable Waste 
Of Public Money

Jeff Ostofsky spent three years of his life peeing into a bottle on 
command. He did this two or three times a week, usually in front of an 
observer, to prove he wasn't using illegal drugs. A positive test would 
have kicked Ostofsky, a former roadie turned heroin addict, out of drug 
treatment. "At the time," says Ostofsky, "I looked at drug testing as the 
price to pay for taking methadone," the synthetic opiate drug he was 
prescribed to wean him off smack.

Ostofsky, who hasn't suffered a relapse since starting methadone treatment 
six years ago, no longer has to endure the indignity of pee tests. He's 
still on methadone but now counsels people with drug problems at Methadone 
Works, a division of the Works, a city-run downtown needle-exchange. He has 
a job and he's off heroin, but Ostofsky still gets angry when he thinks 
about those three years. The urine tests were "used as a bludgeon," he says.

Now the provincial government is planning its own drug test bludgeon as 
part of its promise to slash welfare benefits for addicts who can't prove 
they're clean. The plan, outlined in campaign documents and the Throne 
Speech of Oct. 21, includes providing addicts with "the drug treatment they 
require to break free from welfare." To achieve this end, the Tories 
propose to test welfare recipients for drug use and provide mandatory rehab 
for those who test positive.

Ostofsky thinks it's "an insidious idea." His opinion is shared by an array 
of politicians, addiction specialists and civil libertarians. These critics 
say mass testing of welfare recipients would be expensive, unfair and a 
gross invasion of privacy. They worry the Tories won't adequately fund the 
kind of treatment network that should complement any testing regime. And 
they're concerned about the impact of false-positive tests. Also, since 
drug tests detect marijuana more readily than cocaine or opiates like 
heroin, it looks as if the Tory test regime would penalize occasional 
tokers more harshly than hard drug addicts. This August, in a speech to the 
Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Toronto, Premier 
Mike Harris explained the rationale behind mandatory drug testing and 
treatment. "People on welfare can't get off welfare and hold down jobs if 
they're on drugs," he said.

True enough: it's hard to gain decent employment when your life is centred 
on finding, buying and using drugs.

A 1997 study by the Addiction Research Foundation (now part of the Centre 
for Addiction and Mental Health) of 114 Toronto opiate users found a little 
over half had engaged in "some sort of paid work in the past 12 months." 
That said, eight out of 10 were unemployed at the time of their interview. 
Of the 17 per cent who actually had jobs, only a third worked full-time.

No comparable employment stats have been tabulated for the roughly one in a 
hundred Torontonians who use crack cocaine, though it's probably safe to 
say job prospects aren't too good among hardcore users.

Making addicts job-ready isn't going to come cheap. If only to avoid 
lawsuits from welfare recipients who took the wrong cold medications, the 
government will have to spend a lot of cash to set up its testing regime.

Any testing program will undoubtedly concentrate on urine. While drug tests 
can be performed on hair and saliva, urine is "historically the medium of 
choice" for testing, says Dr. John Wells, manager of the human drug testing 
department at Maxxam Analytics.

The largest company of its kind in Canada, Maxxam processes up to 700 urine 
samples a day and is one of only three Canadian labs certified by the U.S. 
Department of Transportation. According to Wells and other drug test 
experts, that department's regulations set the gold standard, as it were, 
for drug testing. "We've been batting 100 per cent from the DoT in 
certification," boasts Wells.

COSTS THAT ADD UP

Under the DoT's regulations -- which now apply to all Canadian truckers who 
cross the border -- workers are tested twice. First there's a screening 
test. If that picks up positive results for banned drugs, there's a 
confirmation test. Maxxam charges about $20 for a basic screening and 
confirmation test, provided the tests are conducted for a company in which 
a low number of positive results are expected. If a client wants to test 
for a large array of illegal substances and expects a high number of 
positives, the price can climb to $35 or even $85, says Wells. Added to any 
test is a $25 fee for the company that physically collects the sample and 
transports it to a lab.

The CAMH heroin study estimates there's roughly 15,000 opiate addicts in 
Toronto alone. Testing 1,000 of them would cost anywhere from $45,000 to 
$110,000. And that's just for starters. "The actual testing process is not 
that expensive," says Wells. "What is expensive is the infrastructure. The 
company has to decide what to do when the test is positive."

Companies that follow DoT regulations generally send samples to Medical 
Review Officers for further analysis. Dr. Barry Kurtzer is a certified MRO 
and principal owner of Healthstar, a medical agency that serves as a 
third-party administrator between testing labs and companies. Part of his 
job is determining whether a positive drug test was caused by a legitimate 
medical prescription -- some cold medicines, for example, have been known 
to cause positive readings for amphetamines.

Kurtzer also has to determine whether a non-pharmaceutical substance 
triggered a positive reading: poppy seed bagels can cause positive readings 
for morphine while non-intoxicating hemp oil can trigger a reading for pot.

The cost of private drug-testing is hard to calculate, but a report issued 
this September by the American Civil Liberties Union pegs the total cost of 
weeding one drug user from the workforce at US$77,000.

A CAMH study conducted in 1993 determined that only 4 per cent of Ontario 
firms employing over 50 people used drug testing programs. Most of those 
that test are in the transportation sector, says Dr. Scott Macdonald, who 
conducted the survey.

Thanks in part to DoT rules, Macdonald thinks testing among Ontario firms 
has increased to maybe 6 per cent of the province's bigger firms.

Private sector testing is more common in the U.S., where an estimated 196 
of Fortune 200 companies conduct drug tests on their employers.

"In the U.S., the emphasis has been towards enforcement and punishing 
[drug] offenders," says Macdonald. "In Canada, the main emphasis of policy 
has been prevention and treatment. Companies have generally not accepted 
the idea of doing tests just to catch people doing drugs." Nor have human 
rights tribunals. In 1998, the Ontario Divisional Court upheld a decision 
by the Ontario Human Rights Commission that struck down a drug testing 
policy at Imperial Oil. A Toronto-Dominion Bank drug testing policy was 
also disallowed following a lengthy court fight.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which was involved in the cases 
against TD Bank and Imperial Oil, will launch a lawsuit if the Tories 
proceed with their testing initiative, according to CCLA general counsel 
Alan Borovoy.

"At a time when virtually all jurisprudence in Canada has been against this 
kind of testing in the workplace, the Ontario government comes in like a 
raging Neanderthal," says Borovoy. He describes drug testing welfare 
recipients as "a gratuitous encroachment on the privacy and dignity of the 
most vulnerable people in society."

Even if the CCLA doesn't challenge the drug testing plan, the Ontario Human 
Rights Commission might. Keith Norton, a former PC cabinet minister and 
current Human Rights Commissioner for the province, has warned that the 
drug testing plan might be discriminatory. In the Imperial Oil case, the 
Ontario Court decided that drug or alcohol addiction constituted a 
handicap. According to this logic, weeding out drug users via tests amounts 
to discrimination. Norton has stated that the government's test plan rests 
on shaky constitutional ground and could be open to a challenge under the 
Canadian Charter of Rights.

The PCs would be wise to take such legal threats seriously. On Nov. 10, a 
U.S. federal judge temporarily blocked a Detroit-based drug test program 
for welfare recipients following a challenge by the American Civil 
Liberties Union. The ACLU argued, and the judge agreed, that testing people 
on social assistance without suspicion was an unconstitutional violation of 
search and seizure provisions. If the judge's decision is upheld, 
Michigan's first-in-the-nation drug test program will be scrapped, having 
lasted a grand total of two months.

The ACLU has been advancing its anti-drug testing agenda on another front. 
Its report, Drug Testing: A Bad Investment, blasts common assumptions 
behind conducting tests in the workplace. The report claims that "moderate 
use of illicit drugs by workers during off-duty hours is no more likely to 
compromise workplace safety than moderate off-duty alcohol use."

The ACLU report also cites a study of Silicon Valley firms that found drug 
testing decreased productivity by frightening off potential employees and 
dampening morale among staff.

A REAL STEP UP

Unlike well-paid Silicon Valley workers, however, welfare recipients are a 
scorned minority whose salaries are footed by the state.

"If welfare money is being used to buy drugs, the question is, do 
[taxpayers] have a legitimate beef?" asks Dr. John Wells. Many would say yes.

However, drug testing alone will be pointless without treatment programs. 
Ostofsky complains that he has clients who can't get into in-patient 
treatment right now. He wonders what will happen if the government starts 
forcing new patients into treatment without expanding funding for rehab. 
Nor does testing alone address the kind of ancillary problems associated 
with extreme addiction cases. As Ostofsky points out, welfare dependency is 
the least of some addicts' worries.

Homelessness and mental illness are rife among hardcore users. "For some of 
our people, it would be a step up just to be on welfare," says Ostofsky.

TESTS TARGET POT OVER HARDER STUFF

George Smitherman is Liberal MPP for Toronto Centre-Rosedale, a riding with 
a widespread crack cocaine problem. He's concerned that a drug testing plan 
will fail to recognize that "not all drugs are equal." Getting crackheads 
into treatment might be a fine idea, but Smitherman worries that occasional 
pot smokers will be the ones who get nailed. That's because cannabis -- 
surely the least harmful of illegal drugs -- can be detected in the body 
much longer after use than more dangerous substances. Cocaine and heroin 
are flushed from a user's system "within days," according to Dr. Kurtzer. 
But THC (which gives cannabis its psychoactive kick) lingers in people's 
bodies much longer. "It's not uncommon to test positive four to six weeks 
after consuming THC," says Dr. Kurtzer. As Ostofsky says, this could lead 
to a system in which hard-drug addicts on social assistance "don't use for 
48 hours and pass" drug tests while infrequent marijuana users fail. -- NH

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