Current Drug Abuse Trends & Need for Drug Testing

The need for drug testing, particularly a rapid-result test that is easy to collect and can detect recent use, has never been more critical.

• • Drug abusers are less safe and more costly than their non-using co-workers. Reportedly, 65 percent of on-the-job accidents are due to drug and alcohol abuse.[i]Additionally, 38 to 50 percent of all workers’ compensation claims are related to drug and alcohol abuse.[ii]Workers with substance abuse disorders miss two more weeks annually than their peers, averaging nearly 25 days of missed work per year.[iii]Drug users are dangerous, expensive and result in $200 billion in lost productivity annually.[iv]
  • Drug users hate drug testing. In a survey conducted by the federal government, 40 percent of full-time workers who admitted to being current illicit drug users said they were less likely to work for a company that conducted random drug testing. Additionally, 30 percent said they were less likely to work for a company that conducted pre-employment drug testing.[v]
  • Employers are still legally responsible for what their employees do while on the job. The legalization of marijuana has not suspended negligent hiring and respondeat superior laws that hold employers legally liable for accidents, property damage, fatalities, theft, fraud and other bad acts caused by or committed by employees. If an employee is driving a vehicle to make a work-related delivery while high on marijuana, for example, and causes an accident, the employer will be legally responsible for property damages and any harm caused to others. Legal marijuana is no defense for the employer who could’ve known if an employee was a safety risk by conducting pre- and/or post-hire drug testing.

Midway through 2020, the Current Consulting Group (CCG) conducted a survey of drug testing providers in which 13 percent said they’d had clients switch to or add oral fluid testing since the start of the pandemic. In a CCG survey conducted at the end of 2020, the percentage of providers who said they’d had clients switch to or add oral fluid testing increased to 15 percent. When employers were asked the same question, 17.6 percent said they had either switched to or added oral fluid or were considering doing so.

For some companies, it may not come down to using just one drug testing method to the exclusion of all the others. However, for many companies, rapid-result oral fluid testing is an ideal match for pre-employment testing and it works well when employers must know immediately if someone had drugs in their system following an accident or when substance abuse is suspected.

Finally, another reason for the trend that is seeing oral fluid testing increase its market share is that rapid-result oral fluid testing is relatively easy to conduct anytime, anywhere, which can significantly impact the return on investment from drug testing in a very positive way. When collection times are reduced from 2-4 hours to less than 10 minutes with an on-site oral fluid test, the true cost of a drug test is demonstrably reduced.