An employer recently contacted us to perform a reasonable suspicion test on one of their employees. One of the employer’s supervisors had attended our Reasonable Suspicion Training Class and was equipped with the knowledge of how to spot the signs and symptoms of an impaired employee.

As we teach in the class, the employer had the employee escorted to the clinic. You should never allow an employee you believe might be impaired drive themselves to the clinic. Doing so is a safety hazard to the public and could be a huge liability to the employer if the employee harms someone on their way to the clinic. You’d be surprised how many employees arrive at our clinic drunk, having driven themselves there on the directions of their employers – it happens several times a year.

It’s not unusual for some drug users who seek employment or are subject to random testing to keep clean urine and/or adulterants on them during work or while seeking a job. For these folks, putting these substances in their pocket or purse is a part of getting dressed every morning like you and I might carry a pocket knife or lipstick.

We recently had a donor give us a urine sample that we could not accept – if you read this blog regularly, you know it’s “same story, different day”. The donor was very emphatic that the specimen did come from his body and pressed the collector to tell him what logic we used to determine this was not his urine. As a collector, we have the right to reject any specimen for any reason. First Choice collectors are taught to simply reply, “we don’t believe it came out of your body.” We teach this response so as not to educate cheaters what methods and senses we use to determine why we believe the specimen did not come from their body.

One of the largest drug testing labs (and the lab we use) is Quest Diagnostics. Each year they produce a report called the drug testing index. In that report is the positivity rate of drug testing based on the thousands of tests they process each year. 2022 results have not been released yet, but results from 2021 show a 4.6% positivity rate overall.