By Bill Current and eMed Screen
The legalization of marijuana is changing the world, which may be having a direct impact on attitudes and policies regarding workplace drug testing. Yes, drug testing remains an important part of any company’s efforts to maintain safe workplaces and productive workers.
Consider the following:
- Drug abuse, particularly marijuana use, is on the rise.i
- About 70% of drug users are employed.ii
- The average substance abusing employee costs his or her employer approximately $8,800 per year.iii
- Post-accident positive drug test results are at a 25-year high.iv
- And the average cost of a workers’ compensation claim is about $42,000.v
In a 2024 survey of regular marijuana users who are employed, 48% said they use pot at work, including during breaks and while they’re actually on the job. As if that were not bad enough, 31% said they use marijuana while on the way to work.vi In other words, they’re either entering the workplace high or getting high during their shift and as such are probably unfit for duty. Not surprising, the report also found that 60% of survey participants worked for companies that do not conduct drug tests.
Drug testing has always been a strong deterrent to drug use by employees. So, why are some employers dropping marijuana testing or even riskier, dropping drug testing altogether, and what are the possible ramifications of such decisions? In Current Consulting Group’s 2024 Drug Testing Industry Survey, 34% of providers said clients stop testing for marijuana because it is not legal to test for cannabis in their states.vii However, testing for marijuana is legal in almost every state though conditions apply in many jurisdictions.
Also, the survey found that 62% of providers believe some clients drop marijuana from the drug-test panel because they believe it makes it harder to hire people. Which begs the question: At what cost? We know from the Quest Drug Testing Index report cited above that more people are testing positive for marijuana following workplace accidents than at any time in the last 25 years.
A 2021 report from First Advantage found that post-accident positive drug test results are significantly higher among companies that discontinue pre-employment testing. “When post-accident drug positivity for clients who do preemployment drug screening is compared to that of clients who do not, the rate of change is pronounced. Clients that performed pre-employment drug screening experienced a 17% increase in post-accident positivity rates from 2019 to 2020; meanwhile, clients that did not perform preemployment drug screening saw their post-accident rates more than double from 2019 to 2020.”viii
And, of course, the drug that triggers the most positive drug test results is, by far, marijuana. When a company chooses not to screen job applicants for marijuana (let alone other harmful drugs), they will undoubtedly experience more drug-related accidents.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a report of its findings regarding a hot air balloon crash that occurred in June of 2021, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The balloon crashed into a power line, causing the basket to detach from the envelope and plummet to the ground. Five people, including the pilot, were killed.
The official report stated: “Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s use of impairing, illicit drugs” … “Some impairing effects of THC would likely have been present, that would have affected the pilot’s ability to successfully operate the balloon.”
But it’s not just a marijuana problem. A 2024 report found that “Workers in Massachusetts who reported a job-related injury in the past 10 years were 35% more likely to have died of an opioid-related overdose.”ix
Consider the various ways that workplace drug abuse negatively affects a company’s bottom line:
Absenteeism— Substance abusers miss a lot of work. One survey found that 9 percent of heavy drinkers and 10 percent of drug users missed work because of a hangover, 6 percent had gone to work high or drunk in the past year, and 11 percent of heavy drinkers and 18 percent of drug users had skipped work in the past month.x According to one source, unscheduled absenteeism costs companies roughly $3,600 per year for each hourly worker and $2,650 each year for salaried employees.xi
Productivity—Substance abusers are less productive than those who do not abuse drugs. According to the National Safety Council: “The typical worker misses three work weeks (15 days) annually for illness, injury or reasons other than vacation and holidays. Workers with substance use disorders (SUD), however, miss two more weeks annually than their peers, averaging nearly five weeks (24.6 days) a year. Most of these extra days of missed work are associated with illness and injury.”xii
The federal government once claimed that substance abusing employees were one-third less productive than non-drug abusing workers.xiii
Turnover— Replacing workers can be expensive. One report found: “One-fourth of currently employed workers report having more than one employer in the previous year. Employees with a substance problem are much more likely than their peers to report having more than one employer per year: 36% among workers with any substance abuse problem. Workers with a prescription pain medication disorder were even more likely (42%) to have more than one employer.xiv
Safe Workplaces
From a cost perspective, a drug-abusing employee who is, for example, 5 times more likely to cause a workplace accident would cost his or her employer much more than $8,800 per year as cited above. Just focusing on workers’ compensation, the average cost for all claims combined in 2020-2021 was $41,757.xv
The same report found that “the most costly lost-time workers’ compensation claims by cause of injury result from motor-vehicle crashes, averaging $89,152 per workers’ compensation claim that occurred in 2020 and 2021.” Of course, driving is something drug abusers struggle with when they’re high on their drug of choice, be it alcohol, marijuana, or something else.
Conclusion
For more than three decades, employers from virtually all industries have relied on drug testing to help avoid hiring drug users and deter drug use among employees, and it has worked. In 1988, Quest Diagnostics reported an overall average drug-test positivity rate of 13.6%. Over the next 34 years, drug abuse levels went up, came down, leveled off, and more recently went up again. However, during that same period, the average annual drug-test positivity rate consistently went down, reaching an all-time low of 3.5% from 2010 to 2012. A recent increase to 4.6% starting 2012 coincides with the widespread adoption of legal marijuana laws in many states.
As previously noted, some employers struggle to find qualified applicants for job openings and they’ve decided to blame drug testing for that trend. And maybe there’s some truth to that reasoning. In a government-sponsored survey, 30 percent of regular drug users who were employed full-time said they were less likely to work for a company that conducted pre-employment screening and 40% said they were less likely to work for a company that conducted random drug testing.xvi
For employers concerned about the safety of the workplace and productivity of their workers, those statistics should be evidence enough that drug testing is indispensable.
