Excerpt
The news, delivered in a phone call, left Sue Bates aghast: she was losing her job of 22 years after testing positive for a legally prescribed drug.
Her employer, Dura Automotive Systems, had changed the policy at its sprawling plant here to test for certain prescription drugs as well as illicit ones. The medication that Mrs. Bates was taking for back pain — hydrocodone, a narcotic prescribed by her doctor — was among many that the company, which makes car parts, had suddenly deemed unsafe.
“I don’t think it should end the way it did,” said Mrs. Bates, an assembly line worker who has sued Dura for discrimination and invasion of privacy. “You tell somebody you lost your job because you’re on prescription medication and they’re like, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”
Two decades after the Supreme Court first upheld the right to test for drugs in the workplace, Dura’s concern — that employees on certain medications posed a safety hazard — is echoing around the country. The growing reliance of Americans on powerful prescription drugs for pain, anxiety and other maladies suggests that many are reporting to work with potent drugs in their systems, and employers are grappling for ways to address that.
What companies consider an effort to maintain a safe work environment is drawing complaints from employees who cite privacy concerns and contend that they should not be fired for taking legal medications, sometimes for injuries sustained on the job.
“This may be the point guard for an important societal issue,” Dr. Robert T. Cochran Jr., a Nashville pain specialist who treats three of the Dura plaintiffs, said of the lawsuit against Dura. “How do we address these drugs as a society?”
There is a dearth of data from independent groups regarding impairment from prescription drugs in the workplace, partly because the issue has not drawn broad scrutiny.
Quandary indeed, not only for companies but for our society as a whole.
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