Drugs, Police & the Law

Are you opposite to a drugs test? This page centers on the drugs tests like a politics. To obtain more practical or technical information about the drugs tests, please see the tests of the NORML of drugs or of the section of Tests of Drugs Erowid Vault. If you have been a victim of a false positive test of drugs, he can communicate with an official of medical review in his area.

In 1986, the administration Reagan began promoting extensively to the drugs tests in the place of work as part of the climb of the war against the drugs. Since then, the drugs tests there has proliferated the safety of jobs sensitive to positions of not sensitive work of safety to tests of work of employment to drugs tests suspicionless of students of secondary to drugs tests obligatory of the petitioners of public benefits. The drugs tests also it is an almost universal characteristic of the system of penal justice in the United States, with more conditional freedom and conditional freedom they will have to be put to drugs tests independently of the nature of his underlying crime or the history of consumption of drugs.

This proliferation has taken place in spite of the scarcity of tests of which the results of the tests suspicionless generalized of drugs in the places of surer work and the schools, it reduces the problems of abuse of substances, fights the crime, or it is more effective in the attainment of these different and not less costly and less intrusive targets alternatives (for example, the tests of yield of the workpeople, the education honest on drugs and extracurricular activities for the students of secondary, etc.)

Although one has increased the drugs tests, also it has been done by technologies of detection of drugs of the tests of urine for the test of hair, tests of perspiration, the tests of saliva and the use of the called "experts' drugs of recognition". The positive results of these tests of drugs are used to impose a wide scale of sanctions, of the expiration of the conditional freedom or the conditional freedom and immediate return to the jail or prison, to the loss of the incapability of the parents or the rights of care on the children, with the dismissal of the work, to inform in extracurricular activities the activities, the refusal of public benefits, and this way successively. Unfortunately, many of the most recent technologies are proved by you of drugs they are it sufficiently trustworthy and the yield of a significant number of "false positive" results of the tests - that is to say, detection of drugs that seem to show the use of drugs when none of them has taken place. Also, an increasing number of prescription and of medicines of free sale, and even the food to produce positive results of the drugs although the person is trying on, not to consume drugs. The absence of reliability of the technologies of proving many of drugs is a matter of serious worry, particularly when the negative consequences that stem from the tests of positive drugs are so enormous.

Finally, the drugs tests it has been to a great extent to the margin of his therapeutic bases. A real test of the positive drug provides little information, unless a substance in particular has been consumed. It does not indicate if this substance has been consumed, if the person was under the influence of the drugs at the moment of the test or during the work, if the person can carry out his upbringing responsibilities, if the person suffers from a disorder of addiction (or he is simply only one occasional time or drug addict), or even if the person who knowingly consumes the substance. It is a question of an employer rare, school district, the governmental bureaucracy or agency of police officer that uses not to prove the drugs to the persons sanction, but to determine if the persons who are to drugs test suffer from addictions and, in affirmative case, to provide the persons with the options of treatment and services of support.

Drug Policy Alliance Network, together with the ACLU on Politics of Drugs Project of Litigation and the national lawyers for the pregnant women it is involved in a variety of legal challenges to the expansive politics of tests of drugs and technologies of trustworthy tests of drugs. These challenges I try of supporting and reinforcing the right to the intimacy in the Constitution, guaranteeing the due process for all the persons, and promoting rational politics of test of drugs established in the science and the public health instead of guesswork and the fear.

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