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presents
INSIDE URINALYSIS
By Dean Latimer
SOURCE: High Times, p34 (issue unknown at the present time)
Typed by Fetal Juice
Toxic File #81
*Drug urinalysis is a fraud and a swindle.* This month we're
running a thoughtful, lucid, even-handed piece on the legal
developments surrounding drug testing, written by San Francisco
attorney Steven Rhoads, as a public service. Readers who haven't
followed every issue of HIGH TIMES for the last five years will
undoubtably have missed some of this information, and so Mr. Rhoads'
article provides a good opportunity to re-present these important
legal data in one place.
I feel, however, that Attorney Rhoads is almost *too* even-handed
in addressing this issue. He courteously gives the promoters of drug
urinalysis credit for at least being honest in their basic
motivations: to benevolently protect society from a perceived "drug
epidemic" by testing people with what they believe to be accurate,
reliable methods and instruments. And to be sure, many urinalysis
promoters undoubtedly do cherish the delusion that drug use in America
is at "epidemic" levels, and are so ignorant of technology and basic
human physiology that they think wholesale urine testing is a rational
response to their fantasy of a drug epidemic.
The loudest prompters of drug urinalysis, though - most signally,
current and former "scientists" associated with the National Institue
on Drug Abuse - are perfectly aware of the basic falsehoods they spout
to promote the testing racket. They know that the national incidence
of drug use as dropped dramatically for every year throughout the
'80s, with the single exception of cocaine use. Since even the
coke-use statistics aren't really *drastically* higher then the
former, there really is no drug epidemic raging in this country at
all. To go by NIDA's own statistics, in fact, people in the '80s -
and *especially* teenagers and young adults - have been pretty
sickeningly well-behaved all through this decade. This rather
depressing development is nowhere better illustrated then in NIDA's
annual survey of drug abuse terends among teens and young adults, the
"Monitoring the Future" series, available free from NIDA to anyone
skeptical of what they're reading here. All the drug-use indicator
graphs go *way* down throughout the '80s, with the single exception of
cocaine use. So they're all lying when they bleat about an American
"drug epidemic," and therefore no reason exists to give them credit
for honesty.
As for the truly sorrowful prevalence of cocaine nowadays in the
American workplace, street market, and schoolyard, the piss-test
profiteers also know perfectly well how drug urinalysis does *worse*
then nothing to ameliorate this supposed epidemic. Cocaine is
virtually undetectable in urine less then 36 hours post-ingestion,
providing a virtually useless "catch window" for urine monitors.
Moreover, anyone deft enough to toot a line of coke through a
rolled-up dollar bill is certainly deft enough to palm a litle salt or
ammonia into his or her urine sample (regardless of whether anyone's
"watching" or "taking the sample temperature" or whatever) to blank
it. Therefore, the only people who most often get in trouble with
cocaine urinalysis are victims of false positive reading.
The piss-test profiteers know how easily *that* happens, too.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people have to take
over-the-counter patent medications containing *atropine*, an
all-purpose drugstore nostrum employed for the alleviation of
everything from asthma to diarrhea to seasickness. Since it's closely
related in basic chemical structure to the cocaine molecule, atropine
*can* cross-react with cocaine on simple urinalysis screenings,
causing a "positive" test result. The non-druggie thus becomes a
victim of an imprecise technology, suffering loss of employment,
intense confusion and personal anguish, and ostracism by *his*
non-drug-using peers. Proof that this happens is not hard to come by,
and it's known to all the primary pushers of urinalysis testing.
However, the fact is that no one can hazard even the remotest
guess as to how *often* it happens. The various professional services
that monitor the reliability of respectable licensed laboratories -
such as the national proficiency-testing program of the College of
American Pathologists in Chicago - simply do now bother to include
atropine among the drugs they send to the labs for testing.
Therefore, since no one can possibly calculate how *often* atropine is
mistaken for cocaine in routine urinalysis testingnoke-testing is
"safe" for the piss-test profiteers: no one can sue a lab for ruining
their life with a false "cocaine" positive, because there just aren't
any statistics on false coke positives to begin with.
But the profiteers, just as they know perfectly well that there's
no drug epidemic in America, also know that *some* of the people
ruined by "cocaine" positives were really only takeing hay fever
medications. They know it, but they don't mention it. And whether
they supress this information because they're personally prepared to
have these innocent people crucified for the greater good of their
stated social ideal - a "drug-free workplace" - or whether it's just
because the truth would certainly get them sued, and just possibly
*jailed*, is immaterial.
These peoples are lying. They're perpetrating a pernicious
fraud that makes money for them: a swindle. There is no sense in
kindly giving frauds and swindlers credit for having basicaly good
intentions even when they *do* have good intentions. In fact, unless
you come straight out and call them criminals, you leave them an
unobstructed field for their criminality.
(c)opied from some High Times..Fetal Juice/Toxic Shock July 1990