Imagine you are a prison officer. It is your birthday and, in the early evening, you invite a few friends and family to your home for a small celebration. You drink four pints of lager, or the equivalent in alcoholic “units”. You nevertheless go to bed at 10.30pm and you report to work at 8am the following morning.
Reasonable enough? Most of us would think so. But, if the Home Office has its way, you would be liable to disciplinary action. Because, under an extraordinary document from the Home Office, “The Draft Policy on Alcohol and Drug Misuse in the Workplace”, which is rumoured to be the model for future policy by the government towards the millions employed by or contracted to the public sector, you would be forbidden from drinking more than seven units of alcohol (about three and a half pints of beer) in the 16 hours before you start work. And you would be banned from drinking any alcohol at all in the eight hours before going on shift. Managers would be able to order you to take breath tests to detect the presence of booze, and to demand samples of urine for drugs tests at any time. For five days a week, your employer will be watching you, in effect, in the pub or restaurant or at your dinner table, and wagging an admonitory finger when the bottle is passed.
The Home Office document provides a glimpse of the world that looms before us. Nobody objects to the principle that prison officers and others should be banned from drinking and taking drugs at work, nor that they should be punished if they turn up for duty under the influence of alcohol. It is only when you see how the definition of what constitutes being under the influence has been stretched that you begin to realise what is happening. Work is being used to reform manners.
From the Olympics to the personnel departments of mundane companies, drugs testing is exploding and creating new instruments of surveillance. Since 1995, 323,000 troops have been tested – a mere 1 per cent were found to be positive. (Let us not forget that British soldiers were given amphetamines in the Second World War, and scarcely an army in history has gone into battle without taking large drafts of Dutch courage.)
The Institute of Employment Rights estimates that about 250,000 employees are tested regularly at work, and it expects many more to be tested in the future. In occupations as diverse as flying and forensic science, urine examinations – known as “piss-and-dip tests” to initiates – are commonplace. John Courtis, of the recruitment specialists Courtis and Partners, told the Guardian that “Would you permit us to arrange a test for possible substance abuse?” is becoming a killer question at job interviews. (You can scarcely expect to be hired if you reply with a “no”.) Away from the office, Surescreen Diagnostics of Derby is offering parents a £24.99 drugs-testing kit for use on their children, comprising a urine cup, test strips and, hygienically, gloves. It promises a full back-up service if the litmus papers turn a funny colour.
The Home Office and its various agencies, predictably, are in the forefront of this crusade. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, is giving the police powers to test every suspect brought to a station.
Particularly rigid and demeaning are the controls that the Prison Service plans on the 300 people recruited from drug advice charities to persuade prisoners, with the gentle arts of counselling and therapy, to kick their drugs habit. Governors will have the right to demand urine samples from the charity workers to check that they are free of drugs. The recruits have been told they will be escorted from the jail to a laboratory. They will be allowed to pee in private, but must remove their jackets and coats and leave all bags outside to avoid the ever-present danger of samples of uncontaminated urine – from a friend or helpful neighbour, perhaps – being smuggled into the loo.
Other rules for the charity workers may seem less controversial. Anybody convicted or released from a custodial sentence in the past five years or who has had a conviction at any time for the supply of drugs will be banned. For maximum-security jails, the restrictions are tighter. No drugs worker will be admitted if he has any drugs offence on his record. Yet many of the best counsellors available are reformed junkies who can share with addicts accounts of their struggle from dependency, in the manner of saved sinners at a revivalist rally.
In other words, the soldiers in the war against drugs are to be treated as potential traitors. “We are not at all happy,” said the director of one charity, who did not want to be named for fear of losing his government contract. “We’re not seen as professionals who can be trusted.”
Harry Fletcher, a spokesman for the probation workers’ union Napo, said that staff were preparing a legal challenge to the Home Office’s draft document on drink and drugs at work – “although we would drop it if Jack Straw closed all the bars in parliament”. Like everyone else these days, Fletcher is threatening to hit the government with the Human Rights Act. I suspect he won’t get far. The judiciary has never intervened to protect the privacy of workers or to limit the growth of surveillance.
The judges’ indolence in the face of searches of intimate body fluids without a warrant is unfortunate, because there is plenty of evidence from the United States – where, like so many other government policies, this idea originated – that drugs and alcohol testing is not merely intrusive and insolent, but also junk science. Workplaces in the US have become giant public conveniences awash with urine samples: 400 of the Fortune 500 companies take the piss from their staff; about half the workforce is routinely tested.
There is little pretence that testing is about anything other than social engineering. A survey of 63 companies in Silicon Valley found that urine testing reduced productivity – cowed workers took out their resentment by dragging their feet. Nor is it only staff with sensitive tasks who are monitored. The poor in Florida must pass a drugs test before they can receive what meagre benefits are on offer.
“I waited for the attendant to turn her back before pulling down my pants,” one woman reported to the American Civil Liberties Union, “but she told me she had to watch everything I did. I am a 40-year-old mother of three: nothing I have ever done in my life equals or deserves the humiliation, degradation and mortification I felt.”
Tests reveal more than the presence of drugs. The police in Washington DC admitted that they were secretly examining the samples of their women workers to see if they were pregnant. Analysis of locks of hair can also be used to find out if the employee is suffering from Aids, cancer, epilepsy or heart disease.
Yet these forms of surveillance cannot prove that you are unfit for work. They detect “metabolites” – inactive traces of a drug that may have been taken weeks earlier – while missing cocaine that has just been snorted and has yet to enter the bladder or drift into the scalp.
There are good grounds for suspecting that many of those who test positive are innocent. Both the Civil Liberties Union and the US National Academy of Sciences have warned that the drugs-testing business’s claims to infallibility are worthless. Users of anti-inflammatory drugs have found themselves condemned for taking marijuana, while the poppy seeds in bagels have the unpleasant side effect of labelling their eaters as heroin users.
Moreover, countermeasures to drugs surveillance are now on the market. There are gums and teas that claim to purge customers’ systems of all traces of illegal consumption; shampoos that remove evidence of inappropriate substances from your hair; and the Whizzinator, which comes with a toxin-free urine sample and heat pads to ensure that it can be delivered to your investigators at body temperature.
It is easy to depict their producers as enemies of a good society. Who, after all, would want to be in the hands of a plastered pilot? Yet a stoned or drunk worker can be spotted without the need to import expensive technology. The motive behind the testing boom is not solely a desire to guarantee public safety, nor the legitimate expectation of employers that their staff be bright-eyed and able to work; it is the disciplining of private life.
For Britain gormlessly to follow the US without a national debate or inquiry into the reliability of testing by the government’s medical officers is pathetic, if predictable. But at least it will have the unintended consequence of debunking a line of cant that has been far too popular of late.
Apologists for the status quo such as Charles Handy and Charles Leadbeater spent much of the 1990s opining that liberated knowledge workers had taken up their portfolios and walked to a new freedom. The rise in wage inequality – now at its greatest since records began in the 1880s – was justifiable because employees had been as empowered as company bosses.
The security cameras and the e-mail, telephone and internet monitors have been a rebuke to these burblings for years. But I think that the spectacle of employees being ordered into dingy toilets, where the water supply has been cut off to prevent dilution of samples, and being told to piss into a glass by a gawping supervisor may at last force these gentlemen to hold their tongues.
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