Owing to the increasing amount of stress in the present work scenario, the number of people opting for pain relievers as the resort for beating stress is increasing. The pain relievers or analgesics are potent compounds that produce immediate pain relief. But long term usage of such drugs like opiates, PCP, etc leads to abuse of the drug resulting in drug dependence and addiction. Cocaine, THC, etc also can be included under this. Such people who are addicted to drugs have low productivity, abseentism, health problems, and increased medical claims resulting in a loss for the company; Screening by drug testing is the procedure that is carried for detecting the drugs of abuse in the body of a suspect.
As an employer you would surely wish to have a drug free work place. But it is possible to drug every person specifically for specific drugs as you would not know that what type of drug that your employees are using. Moreover different drugs have different pharmacokinetics and different cut off concentrations. This obstacle is overcome by devising the random drug testing which is done using multi drug specific panel. It contains large number of strips like 10 or 12 that tests for alcohol, amphetamines, PCP, THC, cocaine, codeine, nicotine, heroine, methadone, etc.
These tests are based on the simple chemical reactions that can be read visually without the requirement of any special apparatus. The urine samples are the most commonly used samples. The reason is that it is easy to obtain, non invasive and moreover it is the major excretory pathway for most of the drugs in our system. The kind of urine testing done differs in relation to the metabolite that requires to be detected. Some of the drugs can be tested by dipping the strips in urine whereas for testing pregnancy it can be done in a stream of urine.
It has become mandatory for many companies to undergo a mandatory drug testing before taking employment as per the drug testing policy of the company. In many companies random drug testing is done on various unexpected situations.
Though some critics say that it is unethical to intrude into the privacy of an individual, it can not be denied that drug testing in high risk jobs is essential like navy, army, flying, government jobs, high profile jobs, etc. such a pre employment drug testing would rule out the use of drugs from any work place and reduce the various health hazards related to it apart from increasing the company’s productivity.