American Trucking Associations supports hair testing to screen for drug use

The American Trucking Associations (ATA) announced Monday it supports a bill, before the United States Congress, which proposes to let motor carriers use hair testing to detect drug use in pre-employment screening, though some unions claim this method has a risk of false positives.

“Hair testing is an effective tool for identifying drug users due its long detection window and because it is difficult for donors to beat the test,” wrote Bill Grave, president and chief executive officer of the ATA, in an Aug. 24 letter to lawmakers on four committees of congress.

Two similar bills -titled Drug Free Commercial Driver Act of 2015 – were introduced March 19. Rick Crawford, the Republican representing the 1st district of Arkansas, tabled the House version while Arkansas Republican Senator John Boozman tabled the Senate version.

The House version proposes to change “regulations that require motor carriers to conduct pre-employment, reasonable suspicion, random, and post-accident testing of commercial motor vehicle operators for controlled substances or alcohol.” If passed into law, motor carriers would be able to “use hair testing as an acceptable alternative to urinalysis for detecting use of controlled substances by an operator, but only for pre-employment testing and random testing.” In the House version, the carriers would only be able to use hair testing for random testing if the same method was used for pre-employment testing.

The House version also proposes to let “a motor carrier that demonstrates it can carry out a hair testing program consistent with generally accepted industry standards to apply to the Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for exemption from mandatory urinalysis testing.”

The bills were opposed by some unions and other organizations.

A hair specimen “can test positive for a drug that its donor was merely exposed to but never actually ingested,” the Transportation Trades Department of the American Federal of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations claimed in a letter to federal legislators Aug. 20. TDD, a coalition of 32 unions, also claimed that the U.S. department of Health and Human Services “has not established procedures that reliably and accurately distinguish drugs ingested by an individual from those found in the environment and absorbed by the hair. As a result, hair specimen runs serious risk of producing false positives.”

The 17 other signatories to TDD’s letter included the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, United Steelworkers and the American Civil Liberties Union.

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“The process Congress established years ago has created drug testing standards that are not only effective, but scientifically and forensically sound,” wrote TDD and the 17 other signatories Aug. 20. “Any changes to these standards must be backed by similar evidential support carefully studied by the experts with such authority.”

But on Monday, ATA’s Grave argued that the HHS Drug Testing Advisory Board (DTAB) “recently unanimously approved recommendations that state, ‘Based on the review of the science, DTAB recommends that [HHS] pursue hair as an alternative specimen in the Mandatory Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing Programs, including performance standards that sufficiently address external contamination and hair color impact.'”

ATA is a federation that includes 50 affiliated state trucking associations.

“Hair testing labs have made significant strides in distinguishing positive results due to environmental contamination from those attributable to illegal drug use,” Grave wrote in the letter to members of Congress. “Accredited hair testing laboratories employ robust washing processes, now standard in the industry, to rid samples of external contamination. Of importance, an August 2014 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) study established extensive washing as an effective method for decontamination.”

Grave’s letter was addressed to the chairmen and ranking Democrat members of both the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation committee and the House of Representatives Transportation & Infrastructure committee.

“Since implementing pre-employment hair tests, two large motor carriers employing over 25,000 drivers have reduced their post-accident testing rates to zero,” Grave wrote. “In other words, they have eliminated crashes in which drug use on the part of the truck driver may have been a factor. Further, a survey of just four large carriers revealed that, this year alone, 706 drivers failed hair tests but passed urine tests.”