Illegal Drug Use at Work Takes a Statistical Drop

A company that tests workers and job applicants for illegal and abused drugs said Tuesday that it has found a declining percentage of Americans on drugs at work in 1990.

Even so, SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories said 11% of the 1.9 million American workers it tested last year came up positive, or with indications of drugs in their systems.

The company reported last July that 12.7% of its workplace drug tests were positive in 1989. That was down from 13.6% in 1988 and 18.1% in 1987.

Harry Groome, president of the laboratories, said Tuesday that he was encouraged by the continuing decline in the percentages but remained discouraged by the absolute number of positive results.

“Eleven percent of the workers we tested turned up positive, even though they knew they faced a drug test,” he said.

The Nichols Institute, a San Juan Capistrano clinical testing company, also has seen a decline in the percentage of employees testing positive for drug use. Gary Hibler, a vice president in charge of the company’s substance abuse laboratory, said the overall positive rate was about 8% in 1990. That was down from an unspecified double-digit figure in 1989, he said.

A drop in percentage can also mean a change in a laboratory’s client base, Hibler said. Nichols does testing for more than 2,000 U.S. companies, more than a third of them in Southern California.

Because his company’s clients have changed during the last two years, Hibler said, it is difficult to draw a hard conclusion from test results. The same would probably apply to SmithKline’s figures, he said.

“The decline doesn’t mean that people have slowly stopped using drugs,” he said. “There are many cases when prospective employees knowingly avoid applying to certain companies that test for drug abuse. So, one has to be careful interpreting these numbers.”

The SmithKline Beecham Drug Testing Index also reported positive results for 2.95% of the 240,000 workers in federally regulated transportation jobs.

The testing of the transportation workers and job applicants came under the federally mandated program that began in December, 1989, for airline pilots and mechanics, railroad employees, truck drivers and others in “safety-sensitive” jobs.

They were tested for five substances: marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, opiates and the hallucinogenic tranquilizer phencyclidine (PCP). Employees of companies with fewer than 50 employees and most mass transit workers weren’t tested under the federal program in 1990.

SmithKline Beecham conducted the tests in 18 laboratories around the country. Its tests of the general work force were for 10 illegal or abused drugs--the five tested on transportation workers plus others that are often abused, such as barbiturates, Valium and methadone.

When the company first released its index seven months ago, critics said the statistics left out several factors.

A U.S. Transportation Department spokesman said random drug tests of the department’s own safety-related employees had found less than 1% testing positive, and medical reviews found about half of them had legitimate reasons for taking prescription drugs.

The SmithKline figures don’t include post-medical review data, but company spokeswoman Tobey Dichter said SmithKline uses pretest interviews by doctors to screen for prescription drugs.

“Besides, these tests are for illegal drugs, not prescription drugs,” she said. “There can’t be that many cancer patients out there who are legally using marijuana.”

The Air Line Pilots Assn. also criticized the transportation test results because they weren’t broken down by job description--pilots, air traffic controllers, mechanics and other jobs.

Dichter said SmithKline had those statistics, but the company wouldn’t release them.