Pubdate: Sat, 20 Apr 2002
Source: Daily Star, The (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The Daily Star
Contact:  http://www.thedailystar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/557
Author: Walter F. Wouk
Note: Wouk is director of The Thomas Paine Project, an organization 
dedicated to protecting the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

TESTING OF WORKERS FOR DRUGS IS WRONG

The right to be left alone is, in the words of the late Supreme Court 
Justice Louis Brandeis, "The most comprehensive of rights and the right 
most valued by civilized men." The right to privacy is an implicit 
guarantee of the Constitution; yet it's the right most violated by 
government officials and corporate America, who force millions of Americans 
to submit to drug testing in order to get or keep a job.

Drug testing presumably innocent individuals as a condition of employment 
is a repudiation of everything America stands for. Drug testing reverses 
the presumption of innocence upon which much of our legal system is built.

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure in their 
persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and 
seizures. Many courts have ruled that to require a urine sample to be 
analyzed is a search under the Fourth Amendment

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 90 percent of U.S. 
companies with more than 1,000 workers require drug tests. Wal-Mart, the 
nation's largest corporation, drug tests all of its 800,000-plus employees.

Drug tests can reveal the use of contraceptives, pregnancy, medications 
used for depression, epilepsy, diabetes, insomnia, high blood pressure and 
heart disease. Employers have found drug testing a simple way to look into 
an individual's medical history. They can easily obtain confidential 
medical information and use it to eliminate job candidates and force 
employees out of their jobs.

Employers who require individuals to submit to drug testing, as a condition 
of employment, are demonstrating their contempt for the U.S. Constitution, 
the Bill of Rights and "We the People."

There is no place in a free country for gratuitous drug testing. It is 
fundamentally anti-American.

Walter F. Wouk, Cobleskill

Wouk is director of The Thomas Paine Project, an organization dedicated to 
protecting the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
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