Drug Screening in the Public Sector: A Focus on Law Enforcement

The academic and legal literature has clearly established a set of policies suited for inclusion in a comprehensive drug screening program. The employment of urinanalysis, random drug tests, reasonable suspicion tests, and chain of custody procedures are mixed with employee safeguards such as test interpretation by medical review officers, analysis in NIDA certified labs, and confirmatory tests for initial positive results. This paper provides a two-fold, empirical examination of those policies. First, the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Testing were surveyed. The IADLEST members' recommendations represent the standards that law enforcement agencies in each state would consider as their most appropriate professional guidelines. Inasmuch as they fall short of what the literature recommends (and they do in regard to a number of items), it is unlikely that individual police departments would find either the support or courage for recommending stronger policies. Second, a North Carolina survey examines the implementation of these recommendations by municipalities in one of the more advanced states included in the IADLEST survey. In general, municipal police departments are found to follow the North Carolina Criminal Justice Standards Division's recommendations.