Posted on: Monday, July 26, 2004

Employers see rising meth use

By Adam Geller
Associated Press

NEW YORK — Often made on the cheap in simple home-based labs, methamphetamine is fast finding its way into the workplace, a new report indicates.

Employers who screen job applicants and workers for drugs saw the number testing positive for methamphetamine surge 68 percent last year, according to Quest Diagnostics Inc., the country's largest testing company. And usage is likely to continue increasing as the potent stimulant spreads to the eastern United States.

The report — tallying the results of more than 7 million workplace drug tests performed last year by Teterboro, N.J.-based Quest — shows the methamphetamine positive rate jumped, along with a smaller rise in positives for opiates such as heroin, even as the overall number of workers failing tests stayed nearly unchanged at 4.5 percent.

"These increases that we're seeing are the largest increases of any drug or drug class for as long as we've been tracking the individual categories" of drug tests, said Barry Sample, director of science and technology for Quest's workplace drug testing business.

Quest has been conducting its annual survey since 1988, but has broken it down by drug category and type of worker only since 1997.

The surge in the use of amphetamines, a crystalline stimulant often called "meth" or "ice," has prompted some states to try to limit sales of the decongestant pseudoephedrine, which is commonly used to make it. While big labs continue to supply most of the illegal methamphetamine consumed in the United States, much of the growth has been fed by small home labs.

Last year, the Drug Enforcement Administration shut down 10,061 small meth labs, up from 8,063 in 2002. "Clearly it's emerged and is still emerging as a serious problem," said Ed Childress, a DEA spokesman.

The number of workers and job candidates testing positive for methamphetamine remains small compared with those testing positive for marijuana. That drug is by far the biggest reason that people fail employer drug screenings, the Quest figures show. About 3 of every 1,000 workers now test positive for meth, compared with about 3 of every 100 workers testing positive for marijuana.

But while marijuana positives have stayed stable, amphetamine detection is soaring in the general work force. That contrasts with airline pilots, workers in nuclear plants and others whose tests are required by the government, for whom positive meth rates have increased only slightly.

In the general work force, though, usage appears to be rising at an even faster rate than in the past few years, when annual increases in the number of positive drug tests ranged from 14 percent to 17 percent.

Employers who do screenings saw a 44 percent increase in positives for amphetamines, the category of drugs that includes methamphetamines. Amphetamines now account for about 9.3 percent of all positive tests, more than double the rate in 1999.

Methamphetamine production and usage has its roots in southern California and was long most prevalent in western states, including Hawai'i. But DEA statistics and Quest testing data shows it has spread to the middle and eastern portions of the country.