Illegal Procedure?

Commercial-Airline pilots smoke marijuana in the cockpit all the time. They giggle and get silly and make P.A. announcements like, "If you look out the left side, you'll see a big wing." Then they gobble up the tourist-class desserts and collide with Piper Cubs. All the high school seniors in America are hooked on crack. They run through band practice tearing the uniforms off majorettes with their teeth. After school, they mug their moms and drive the nation's violent-crime rate through the roof. Many U.S. submarine captains take P.C.P., which is why they so often go into murderous frenzies, release Polaris missiles and start accidental atomic wars.

This is the impression I get from newspapers, magazines and the six-o'clock news. President Reagan and his missus must get the same impression. They went on television together last September, looking worried and a bit peeved. "Drugs are menacing our society," said the President. "They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They're killing our children."

"Drugs take away the dream from every child's heart and replace it with a nightmare," said the First Lady, and she pointed out that "drug criminals are ingenious. They work every day to plot a new and better way to steal our children's lives."

But, said the President, people who are terrorizing America "will see that they are up against the mightiest force for good that we know." Then he invoked God, country and U.S. war dead and promised us all drug-free schools and workplaces. Because, you see, there is a solution to the American drug catastrophe, and the President announced it the very next day--drug tests.

On Monday, September 15, 1986, President Reagan signed an Executive order requiring drug tests for all U.S. Government employees in "sensitive positions." This includes Federal law-enforcement officers, Presidential appointees and people who handle classified information. It also includes everyone whose job is related to national security or public health and safety or protection of life and property, plus anyone in a position "requiring a high degree of trust and confidence." Broadly speaking, it means the janitor at the Yosemite National Park comfort station and all the rest of the Federal Government's 2,800,000 civilian employees. Many state and municipal workers can expect to be tested, too. And more than 33 percent of the Fortune 500 corporations already have employee drug-test programs, with more to come. Soon everyone will be tested for drugs except Mother Teresa (and we can catch her at Customs and Immigration).

What a good idea. Poof! The national cancer of drug abuse will disappear faster than the family farm. All we have to do is whiz in a dish, tinkle in a cup, take a leak in a test tube and generally piddle ourselves dry, and we will never again have any accidental atomic wars started by narco-crazed sub commanders.

Of course, we haven't yet had any accidental atomic wars started by narco-crazed sub commanders. But never mind; lots of other horrible stuff is caused by drugs. Drugs are tearing our society apart and destroying everything we hold dear. Aren't they? If drugs weren't causing monstrous and terrifying calamities, there wouldn't be all this prate and gabble in the media. Would there? I called the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Public Affairs and put it to them squarely. "How many fatal accidents on major airlines have involved drug use by flight crews, air-traffic controllers or other responsible personnel?" I asked FAA spokesman Fred Farrar.

"None."

"That's it?" I said. "Just 'none'?"

"Yes," said Farrar, "the answer is none."

I called the FBI and asked for statistics from its United States Uniform Crime Reports. It turns out that the nation's violent-crime rate is not through the roof. There was a slight rise, 3.1 percent, from 1984 to 1985. But, overall, violent crime has dropped 6.4 percent in the past five years, the first sustained decrease in recent memory.

Then I called the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which had just completed a major survey on illegal drugs. "Is drug use up?" I asked.

"It's basically stable," said Press Officer Lucy Walker with, I think, a hint of regret in her voice. According to the figures Walker gave me, 22 percent of young people aged 18 to 25 use marijuana, down from 27 percent in 1982. Cocaine use is up from seven percent to eight percent in the same period and hallucinogens are holding steady at two percent. Among the general population, the trends are about the same. If drugs are tearing our society apart and destroying everything we hold dear, they are taking their time about it.

Now, nobody wants to be quoted as saying that drugs are cute or a swell thing to give to babies. Drugs are bad. Anybody who's watched 1941 on a video cassette knows that. Drugs have caused a lot of people to do a lot of stupid things, such as hock their kid's Apple II, recite Rod McKuen poetry or stab Nancy Spungen. And drugs have given several of my friends one-way backstage passes to the hereafter. But let's get this thing in perspective. An estimated 900 people died from cocaine overdoses in 1985. Three thousand one hundred seventy expired from gallstones. And more than 43,000 kicked just tooling around on the highway. Drug use is a problem. We shouldn't stop worrying about the problem. But maybe we should start worrying about the solution.

Drug tests are justifiable in certain circumstances. As part of a drug-rehabilitation program, for example, they make very good sense. And DEA agents should take drug tests. People who've been sent to guard the henhouse shouldn't develop a taste for Kentucky Fried. We, the general public, have a right, as helpless cowards, to ask that drug tests be given to those who hold our lives in their hands. Marine Corps drill instructors, IRS auditors and U.S. Presidents should all be given drug tests if we think they're acting loopy. Most IRS auditors do act loopy, and all recent Presidents have.

But the current fad for wide-scale drug tests doesn't have much to do with justifiable circumstances. Note that the drug-test hubbub began with testing professional athletes. We don't depend on these guys for anything except covering the Super Bowl point spread, and there's some question as to whether they do that better with or without drugs. True, children look up to professional athletes. But children are short and look up to everything.

Also note that there's one drug nobody's saying much about. This is the big drug--tonsil polish, idiot oil, vitamin XXX. When it comes to getting sideways, we are not a buzzed nation. We are not a zoned nation. We are Drunk Country. An estimated 22,500,000 Americans are alcoholics or problem drinkers, me for one. Alcoholism costs us around 116 billion dollars a year in lost work, medical expenses, car wrecks and removal of stubborn carpet stains. Booze is responsible for something like 95,000 deaths per annum, who knows how many dumb marriages.

There are simple, cheap and accurate tests for alcohol use. However, nearly two thirds of American adults drink, and that's a lot of voters. So alcohol testing is done sparingly, with probable cause, under highly justifiable circumstances--usually when you're driving home from a toga party. Nobody is trying to make alcohol tests a regular feature of work or school, let alone Government employment. How many Congressmen would care to be tested after six P.M.? A bird can't fly on one wing. A cat can't walk on three legs. Freshen that up for you, Senator?

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs; we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. And we have such tests, too. But I.Q. scores are kept strictly secret. Releasing I.Q. scores would cause Congress more embarrassment than a boxcar of Breathalyzers. And no one is ever sent to Daytop Center because he flunked civics. P.E. is substituted instead. And if you get a positive result on life's tests for greed and power lust, you don't lose your job, you get rich and elected.

So it's much better to test for drugs. What the hell; they're illegal, so all we're going to catch is criminals, anyway. And drugs make a great patsy. Why blame crime and poverty on something complicated and difficult to fix, like schools or the economy? Blame them on drugs.

Actually, using drugs as a scapegoat shows we're making social progress. It's a big improvement over "The Jews are poisoning the wells." But the logic is just as bad, and this bad logic is probably inescapable. Drugs are just too good a political issue. Drug abuse is one of those home-and-mother oratorical points that let politicians bray without fear of offending any powerful lobbying groups, unless they're running for president of Bolivia. Nobody except Timothy Leary and me about four in the morning is going to say a word in defense of illegal drugs.

And drug tests are an ideal way to use the drug issue. Widespread drug tests make it look as if our national leaders are "doing something about the problem." The urge to be doing something about the problem is a fundamental American urge and, by and large, a good one. But, in our love for problem solving, we sometimes forget to ask what the problem is or even (continued on page 147)Illegal Procedure?(continued from page 60) whether or not it's a problem. And once we start doing something, we often lose sight of whether or not that something is the thing to do. I give you Vietnam, just for instance.

Drug abuse is a problem. But the real solutions--education, rehabilitation and medical research--are difficult, complex and uncertain of success. In other words, the real solutions are like reality itself. And reality has never been anything politicians could stand much of. Besides, some of the solutions to the drug problem are politically suicidal. One of the most terrible proven side effects of illegal drug use is jail. Jail will screw your life worse than a Glad bag full of daffy dust. But with drug hysteria in the air, no politico is going to advocate legalization of even the lamest grade of Oaxacan ditch weed. And drug education, to be effective, would be controversial, too. It would have to speak the truth. We can't tell monsters-under-the-bed stories if we want children to believe us about dope. We can't tell them that they'll turn into hydrocephalic unwed welfare mothers if they get downwind from one whiff of crack. Children are dumb enough to try drugs, but they aren't dumb enough to listen to that.

Drug tests are no solution whatsoever. They're just a method of avoiding the problem, and not a harmless method, either. Drug tests are inaccurate. The Federal Centers for Disease Control studied 13 drug-testing laboratories from 1972 to 1981. They found that only one out of 11 of those laboratories could test accurately for cocaine--and the CDC considered 80 percent accuracy acceptable. Common urine-analysis tests for marijuana can show false-positive results from painkillers such as Advil or Nuprin. Contac can trigger false positives for amphetamines. And tonic water can make it look as if you're shooting smack. Even the most sophisticated gas-chromatography and mass-spectrometry tests are accurate in only the 95 percent range. This means that one out of 20 people tested could end up driving a school bus on LSD or going to jail because he sipped a g. and t. last week.

A person who got a false-positive result on a drug test and held one of those ill-defined sensitive jobs would face...I hardly have the stomach to write about it. At best, he would, like Hamilton Jordan in the Carter Administration, emerge from a bureaucratic tag-team match and an ugly court fight with his reputation indelibly smeared. No doubt some Government agency will be established to prevent such miscarriages of justice. Government agencies being what they are, that should make things much worse.

And drug tests are expensive. The most accurate kind costs $100 each, which gives new meaning to the phrase piddling sum. Between $200,000,000 and $300,000,000 a year is already being spent on drug testing. The military alone spent $47,600,000 in fiscal 1985. And The New York Times estimates that if annual drug tests were to be given to the entire U.S. work force, the cost would be several billion dollars. Surely, there is something we need several billion dollars' worth of more than we need several billion dollars' worth of falsely accused citizens and scot-free hopheads.

But even if drug tests were free and 100 percent accurate, they would still be unconstitutional. There is going to be a lot of legal rhubarb over this, and I don't know what a Rehnquist-led Supreme Court is finally going to decide. But I take the same attitude toward the Constitution as Reformation Protestants took toward the Bible: Anyone can read it and witness the truth thereof. Amendment Four is perfectly straightforward:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by an oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

It's hard to see how scatter-shot drug testing could be legal under the Fourth Amendment, no matter how particularly the Government describes the way you take a leak.

And the Fifth Amendment is also clear: "No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." If using the contents of your bladder as evidence isn't making you a witness against yourself, then I suggest that crapping on a Chief Justice isn't assault and battery.

Furthermore, the president of Beth Israel Hospital in New York has been quoted as saying that during drug tests, someone "must watch each person urinate into a bottle. If that is not done, it's a sham." I haven't gone through the Constitution with a fine comb, but I'm sure our founding fathers wouldn't have let this nation get off the ground without putting something in there about going to the bathroom alone.

Drug tests are illegal, expensive, inaccurate, stupid--and those are their comforting aspects. More frightening is what widespread drug tests would do to our country. They would create a national atmosphere of distrust, resentment and demoralization. We all remember how we felt when Dad sniffed our breath for beer after we came home on Saturday night. We all remember how we acted when Mom went through our dresser drawers looking for cigarettes, rubbers and knives. And we remember what we wanted to do when our parents peeked through the recroom door to see if we'd gotten to second base with our dates. Does any country in its right mind want an entire population feeling this way about its Government? We will have a nationwide outbreak of adolescent tantrums, sulks and screaming matches, except that this time it will be the grownups doing it and the mom-and-pop elected officials will find themselves grounded without TV for a year.

But it will be worse yet if the nation doesn't blow up. We will have allowed the Government to make an unprecedented and probably irreversible intrusion into our private lives. This is the first step toward totalitarianism. Of course, it won't be the bread-line-and-barbed-wire totalitarianism the Russians have. It will be an all-American, clean-cut, safety-first, Goody Two-shoes totalitarianism under which everybody takes care of his health, keeps his lawn nice and never, ever does anything naughty or dirty or fun. And there won't be any troublesome, offbeat creative people left to screw it up, either. Try giving drug tests to the great men of arts and letters. There go Coleridge, Poe, Freud, Rimbaud, Aldous Huxley and Jimi Hendrix.

I can think of only one good thing about drug tests: All important Government officials will have to take them, and we'll get to watch. That's a nonnegotiable demand. We will get to stand and stare while the powers that be go potty. This is a democracy, and we're all equal before the law. If they don't trust us, why should we trust them? I think this will be a salutary experience. The high and the mighty will be humbled in the public eye, always a good thing. And--when it comes to certain more bellicose members of Congress and the Administration--we, the people, will find out once and for all if there's anything to this overcompensation business we heard about in Psych 101.

"Drug tests are illegal, expensive, inaccurate, stupid--and those are their comforting aspects."