Workplace drug testing may never be the same. After 30 years of only permitting lab-based urine testing, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) published its final Mandatory Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing Programs using Oral Fluid (OFMG) on October 25 in the Federal Register. The new regulations only apply to federal workplaces, at this time, but the impact is sure to reach beyond the initial scope of the regulations.
drug testing laws, corporate drug testing policies, and the legal argument for how to drug test the right way since the original guidelines were published in 1988. Even though alternative testing methods, including hair testing, instant-result devices, and, yes, lab-based oral fluid testing, have been around for many years, they have not put a significant dent in the market share of lab-based urine testing in the workplace. According to SAMHSA, that’s about to change. In the original Notice of Proposed
C
Rulemaking (NPRM) for oral fluid testing, as well as in the final regulatory language made public in October 2019, SAMHSA projected that about 7% of federal drug tests would transition from urine to oral fluid in the first year.1
Further, the agency
predicted that in four years, 25–30% of all federal workplace drug tests would be conducted utilizing oral fluid. But if that was all, the overall impact of the OFMG on the drug testing industry would be minimal, at best. However, SAMHSA also predicted the same transition rate for the drug tests mandated by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), (approximately 6 million annually), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) (about 155,000 per year).
onsider this: SAMHSA’s mandatory guidelines have served as the blueprint for many state
Projecting a 25–30% transition rate for DOT and NRC represents a significant impact on the industry. But what about the approximately 40
million workplace drug tests not regulated by the federal government? If we realize the same transition rate, which is well within the realm of possibility, we suddenly have a fundamentally transformed drug testing industry. And just in time as state aſter state not only legalizes marijuana but also looks to place restrictions on employers’ rights to test for THC and/or hold applicants and employees accountable when they test positive. Te chief argument behind most of these legal maneuvers is the inability to claim someone is “impaired” solely based on the result from a drug test with a window of detection of days or weeks. Oral fluid, with its tighter window of detection (think hours rather than days), foils the reasoning behind that argument. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
SAMHSA began teasing providers and employers years before the marijuana legalization movement really took off. Te dedicated staff and experts at SAMHSA and the Drug Testing Advisory Board, as well as the all-star teams at DOT and NRC, deserve a tremendous amount of credit for patiently resolving every concern from within and outside the government and persevering long enough to finally issue regulations for a completely different drug testing method.
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www.datia.org datia focus 9
SAMHSA predicted that in four years
25–30% of all federal
workplace drug tests would be conducted utilizing oral fluid.
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