Overall, the proportion of U.S. workers who tested positive for drugs in urine in 2019 rose to 4.5%, the highest level in 16 years, according to Quest Diagnostics Inc., one of the largest drug-testing laboratories in the U.S., which analyzed approximately nine million tests last year on behalf of employers.
That percentage was 29% higher than the 30-year low of 3.5% a decade ago, in the early days of a resurgent heroin epidemic in the U.S. In more recent years, more positive tests for methamphetamine and cocaine have helped to fuel the increase in the share of employees testing positive for drugs.
But the greatest jump has been in workers testing positive for marijuana, which climbed 11% in 2019 in the general workforce from the year before and 29% since 2015. In that four-year span, the number of states that legalized marijuana for recreational use grew to 11 from four, plus the District of Columbia.
Whether more employees have tested positive for drugs amid the stresses of working through coronavirus shutdowns this year isn’t clear. Initial data suggest that both substance abuse and drug-related deaths are on the rise across the overall U.S. population.
“There is concern about the potential impact that Covid-19 is having on depression and people’s substance use patterns,” said Barry Sample, Quest’s senior director for science and technology, who pointed out that the rate of positive drug tests was already trending in the wrong direction before the pandemic.
Organizations need to consider the effects of the pandemic both on workplace safety and employee health “for some time to come,” he said.
National Institutes of Health experts say many traditional support systems to help people struggling with addiction aren’t in place amid the pandemic, and it is harder to access treatment programs and hospital emergency rooms that can initiate treatment.
“All of these aspects are translating into much more stress,” said Nora Volkow, director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, in an interview with NIH Director Francis Collins earlier this month. “And stress, as we know, is one of the factors that leads people to relapse. Stress is also a factor that leads many to increase the consumption of drugs.”
The rise in positive drug-test rates comes even as fewer employers are including marijuana as one of the drugs for which they test. Overall, the number of urine drug tests that include marijuana declined 3% over the past five years. In states where recreational use has been legalized, they fell 6%.
“We’ve seen some employers take kind of a back seat position on marijuana and be more willing to maybe change their drug-testing requirements,” said Michelle Bearden, chief risk officer for Houston-based staffing and recruiting firm Link Staffing Services Inc. Because the company hires for safety-sensitive jobs such as manufacturing and other positions where employees operate machinery, it hasn’t changed its own policies.
“Part of providing a safe work environment is providing a drug-free environment,” she said.
Dale Gieringer, California director at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the data reflect the increasing legality of cannabis—“which is a good thing.”
Mr. Gieringer—who has been advocating for laws that would exempt medical marijuana users in California from workplace drug testing—argues there is no relationship between such tests and workplace performance since they detect inactive metabolites that reside in a person for days after use.
“It is sort of like looking through workers’ trash at the end of the weekend and seeing if there are any empty beer or wine bottles in it,” he said. “It doesn’t really tell you much about how well a person performed on the job.”
Meanwhile, positive urine test rates for opiates—primarily prescription pain relievers containing codeine and morphine—in the general workforce continued to decline, falling 19% in 2019 from the year before and 49% since 2015. Similarly, heroin use, indicated by the presence of the 6-acetylmorphine metabolite in urine tests, dropped 33% from 2018 and halved since its peak in 2015 and 2016.