Study: Illicit workplace drug use highest in a decade

By Angela Woolsey

The percentage of U.S. workers who tested positive for using drugs hit a 10-year high in 2015, according to an analysis conducted by the Madison, N.J.-based diagnostic information provider Quest Diagnostics.

The Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index, which has been conducted annually since 1988, found that roughly 4 percent of employees in the U.S. workforce tested positive for illicit drugs in 2015, a 2.6 percent increase from 2014. The rate of positive drug tests has gone up for five straight years after 2010 and 2011 both recorded a 10-year low of 3.5 percent.

The positivity rate last surpassed 4 percent in 2005, when the drug testing index showed a 4.1 percent rate.

Quest Diagnostics released the study’s findings on Sept. 15 at the Substance Abuse Program Administrators Association’s (SAPAA) annual conference in Louisville, Ky.

According to a press release detailing the results, the drug testing index involved the examination of approximately 11 million workforce drug test results, including 9.5 million urine samples, nearly 1 million oral fluid samples and 200,000 hair tests.

The Herndon-based franchise of ARCpoint Labs, a national drug, alcohol, DNA and steroid testing provider, contributed drug test results to Quest Diagnostics’ study, and director Jon Helm says the findings echo what he has observed at work over the past two years.

“I have seen recently, both in terms of companies and the community, drug use on the rise really over the last couple of years,” Helm said. “We’ve been doing this since March 2010, but it seems to me that we’re getting more positive testing than I’ve seen before.”

Open for both appointments and walk-ins five days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., ARCpoint Labs of Herndon administers tests for everything from drugs and alcohol to DNA and paternity.
The majority of the lab’s clients are workers undergoing employer-mandated tests, adolescents brought in by their families, and people fulfilling a court-ordered requirement.

Though ARCpoint Labs doesn’t rigorously collect data, the number of drug tests coming back positive has increased for both workers and children, according to Helm, who says that he sees at least one positive per day now, whereas he might’ve seen one every one or two weeks when the branch first opened.

According to the Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index, the rate of positive oral fluid drug tests has increased by 47 percent over the last three years, reaching 9.1 percent in 2015 compared to 6.7 percent in 2013.

In other words, almost one in 11 job applicants failed to pass an oral fluid drug screening.

The uptick stemmed predominantly from a 25 percent increase in marijuana detection from 2014 and a 26 percent increase since 2011. Marijuana was found in 45 percent of U.S. workers who tested positive for a substance in 2015.

The rates of detection for amphetamines and heroin have also gone up since 2011, with amphetamine positive tests rising to 44 percent and heroin detection jumping a notable 146 percent.

By contrast, the positivity rate for oxycodone, a pain medication often cited in discussions about the prevalence of opioid-related overdoses and deaths in recent years, has declined every year since 2011.

Helm says that ARCpoint Labs of Herndon has seen the biggest increases in marijuana and cocaine positivity, noting that some drugs like heroin can be harder to detect because they leave the user’s system quicker.

In fact, he believes that there still aren’t enough people coming in for drug testing, considering the number of people who are estimated to be using drugs.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2015 that 10.2 percent of Americans 12 years or older used drugs within the past month, which would equal roughly 32.8 million people.

Looking at opioid and heroin alone, the Fairfax County-Falls Church Community Services Board (CSB) reported a 9 percent increase from 2014 to 2015, and 40 patients required assistance from the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department for a suspected overdose in the first half of 2016, according to the CSB website.

The 2015-16 Fairfax County Youth Survey released on Sept. 16, which collected voluntary responses from public school students in eighth, 10th and 12th grades, showed that nearly 20 percent of respondents had used marijuana at least once in their lifetimes. Approximately 5 percent of students reported misusing prescription medications within the past month.

Many of the survey’s findings marked decreases from previous years, and the rates of cigarette, alcohol and marijuana use were less than half of the rates seen around the country as a whole, but Fairfax County students reported more LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin use within the past month than their national peers.

“I think parents hesitate to test their children, because they don’t want to accuse them or anything like that,” Helm said.

“But when you read about the deaths, you wonder what happened before that…It just seems like, overall, in society, we need to be a little more cognizant and spend more time observing the situation.”