An examination of Federal Railroad Administration accidents statistics demonstrates that random drug testing has had no apparent effect on railroad accident safety, reports California NORML. The FRA data shows that prior to the introduction of random drug testing in 1990, the number of accidents due to human error declined steadily, from 3.8 per million rail miles in 1978 to 1.4 in 1986. Since then, however, the accident rate has held steady at around 1.4 to 1.8.
“This data calls into question the supposed safety benefits of random drug testing,” said California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer. Unlike alcohol tests, drug urinalysis tests cannot detect actual impairment, but only whether a drug was used in the past. In the case of marijuana — the drug detected in the overwhelming majority of positive tests — urine tests can register positive for days or weeks after last use, long after the euphoric affects of the drug have faded.
Random drug testing was imposed on the nation’s railway workers in the wake of a highly publicized 1987 Amtrak-Conrail collision in which the crew were determined to have smoked marijuana. The responsibility of marijuana for the accident was never clearly determined, however. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that better equipment and personnel management would have prevented the accident, but did not recommend drug testing. Nonetheless, Congress promptly rushed to require drug testing for all of the nation’s transportation workers following the accident.
“The effectiveness of this regulation has never been scientifically proven,” states Gieringer. “While proponents say that testing has reduced the number of transportation workers testing positive for drugs, there is no indication this has had any [significant] safety benefits. Problems include: substitution of alcohol and other untested drugs for tested drugs such as marijuana; unreliability of tests in discriminating drug abuse; cheating and evasion by drug abusing workers; and lack of relation between test result and job performance.”
For more information, please contact Dale Gieringer of California NORML at (415) 563-5858 or via e-mail at: CANORML@igc.apc.org