Opinion: Hair Tests More Effective in Exposing Drug Use

By Don Osterberg

Senior Vice President, Safety, Security & Driver Training

Schneider National

This Opinion piece appears in the July 30 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

In 2007, I read a survey revealing that 10% of truck drivers on the nation’s highways admitted to being drug users. As bad as that news was, I realized that, like the old rule of thumb holding that one bug on the kitchen floor means hundreds more are lurking behind the scenes, the full picture was probably far worse.

It was obvious that the urine tests the industry had been relying on to weed out drug users weren’t doing the job. With that in mind, I began to investigate other means of detecting habitual drug users.

An exchange of best practices with another national carrier, J.B. Hunt, led us to the method we believe is far better than urine testing at detecting drug use — hair testing.

Commercially available since the 1980s, hair testing has an excellent track record both for detecting drug users and for holding up in court.

Urine tests can, at best, only detect most drugs 24 to 48 hours after the driver uses them, but hair testing reveals the driver’s drug habits over a period of several months. And, unlike urine testing — which has an entire mythology devoted to methods of avoiding positive results — it’s extremely difficult to tamper with hair tests. And the testing process is much simpler than urine-testing methods.

Schneider added hair testing to our pre-hiring process for drivers in March 2008, using a time frame of one to three business days for results, which is similar to times involved in urine testing. Three years later, we added it to the company’s random-testing program.

Because hair testing can be used to screen for the most commonly abused illegal and prescription drugs, the company uses it to test for the same five families of drugs detected by the U.S. Department of Transportation-approved urine tests.

For those who would question the accuracy of urine testing versus hair testing, the proof is in the numbers. Remember what I said at the beginning of this op-ed column about the 10% of drivers admitting to drug use almost certainly representing much larger numbers who chose not to cooperate with the survey? Well, from the time Schneider administered the first hair test through June 2012, about 120 prospective drivers failed the urine test — but a shocking 1,400 driver prospects had drug-positive hair tests.

While Schneider is pleased that those 1,400 drug users never became drivers for our company, the cold, hard truth is that they probably signed on with other carriers that don’t use hair testing and are out sharing the highway with our families and other motorists right now.

And, no, we can’t warn other fleets about these high-risk drivers. Under current federal regulations, a motor carrier cannot release information about an individual who tests positive on a non-DOT drug test unless they receive a written authorization from that individual — something very unlikely to happen.

What Schneider can do and is doing, however, is to advocate for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to allow motor carriers to use either urine or hair testing in their federally mandated pre-employment screening processes and for random tests. And ideally, all carriers would begin to use both drug-testing protocols.

It’s important to note that urine testing still plays a very valuable role because results from hair testing aren’t detectable until the hair has grown out past the scalp. That means while hair testing is invaluable for showing drug use over a period of months, it doesn’t catch very recent drug use. But urine testing does.

Because of that, urine testing is still needed in situations where it’s important to determine if an individual is under the influence at a given moment. Cases of “reasonable suspicion” or after an accident are two examples of situations where urine testing makes the most sense. Hair testing, on the other hand, should be the method of choice for pre-employment and random testing — times when it’s crucial to identify users.

Drivers themselves are some of Schneider’s strongest champions in the quest to elevate hair testing. Good, responsible, safe drivers are absolutely in favor of a zero tolerance approach to drug abuse and for making hair testing an industry standard. They know that, in addition to needlessly putting lives in danger, a few drug-using drivers make the entire profession look bad.

Shippers also can help push for safer highways in this regard. Ask your carriers if they screen their potential and current driver force with the hair-testing method. If they answer “no,” ask them “why not?” You might consider tendering your freight instead to those actively working to mitigate risk of drug-abusing commercial drivers.

It’s also easy to contact your legislators and ask them to encourage FMCSA to endorse hair testing.

At Schneider National, we believe sharing the same roads as the motoring public means sharing responsibility to ensure they are as safe as possible. Better, more reliable drug detection methods are a must, and hair testing at least deserves to be regarded as a viable alternative — or complement — to urine testing by the federal governing bodies and motor carriers.

The line between a dangerous highway and a safe one may be as thin as a single strand of hair.

Founded in 1935 in Green Bay, Wis., Schneider National provides truckload, logistics and intermodal services throughout North America. It also provides transportation solutions in China.