>>> Part 1 of 4...
YOUR ANALYSIS IS FAULTY
(How to lie with drug statistics)
Published: April 2, 1990
In the war on drugs J. Michael Walsh is one of the administration's
most valuable officers.  His mission is to implement -- and, more
important, to justify -- programs in which the urine of working people
is searched for signs of illegal drugs.  Walsh designed the drug-
testing program for federal employees mandated by Ronald Reagan
several years ago and is now advising business leaders on how to test
their workers.  He has argued in favor of testing before Congress and
federal judges, on national radio and TV shows, and in countless other
public forums.
Walsh's basic message is this: drug users, from crack addicts to
weekend marijuana smokers, make less productive workers than non-
users.  So employers are justified in using drug tests -- which
cannot distinguish between chronic abuse on the job and occasional
use at home -- to root out all users from the work force.
Other officials say the same thing, but Walsh's title gives his words
extra weight.  He is director of the Division of Applied Research and
the Office of Workplace Initiatives at the National Institute on Drug
Abuse (NIDA), the chief federal drug research agency. The evidence he
marshals is passed on to drug czar William Bennett and is widely
disseminated, with the federal government's seal of approval.  This
role, and Walsh's status as a scientist, oblige him to uphold high
standards of objectivity and competence. More than any other person,
he is responsible for the intellectual honesty of the whole Reagan-
Bush drive for workplace testing.  A look at some of the central
claims he has made in support of that drive reveals that he has not
met his responsibility.
Two years ago Walsh testified in federal court that the "cost of drug
abuse to U.S. industry" was nearly $50 billion a year, according to
"conservative estimates." This claim is a staple of anti-drug rhetoric.
It is frequently quoted without qualification by the media, and last
year President Bush rounded it upward to "anywhere from $60 billion
to $100 billion."
Here's how the figure was derived.  In 1982 NIDA surveyed 3,700
households around the country.  The Research Triangle Institute
(RTI), a NIDA contractor in North Carolina, then analyzed the data
and found that the household income of adults who had ever smoked
marijuana daily for a month (or at least twenty out of thirty days)
was twenty-eight percent less than the income of those who hadn't.
The RTI analysts called this difference "reduced productivity due to
daily marijuana use." They calculated the total "loss," when
extrapolated to the general population, at $26 billion.  Adding the
estimated costs of drug-related crimes, accidents, and medical care
produced a grand total of $47 billion for "costs to society of drug
abuse."
Several things are wrong here, but the most glaring is the
simpleminded conclusion that marijuana smoking caused the lower
incomes with which it was associated.  There are many respects in
which the behavior of lower-income people differs statistically from
that of upper-income people, but this mere correlation never
establishes causality.  It is quite probable, for example, that people
who would admit to watching "Wheel of Fortune" every night have lower
incomes than those who do not.  Should we then conclude that
television game shows decrease productivity?  Or, by similar logic,
should we conclude that Thunderbird wine hurts productivity but Chivas
Regal scotch helps it?
You may be wondering why the RTI study used the awkward variable of
"marijuana-use-daily-for-a-month-ever" as an indicator of drug abuse.
Good question.
Actually, the RTI researchers had information on current use (at least
once in the last thirty days) of drugs --including cocaine, heroin;
amphetamines and LSD as well as marijuana--but they could find no
connection to decreased income. If Walsh really accepts the logic
linking a single month-long marijuana binge to decreased productivity,
he must also conclude that current use does not decrease productivity.
But he shows no signs of doing so.
Walsh now admits that the RTI study "is based on assumptions that need
additional validation." One wonders why he hasn't passed that
information on to Bush, Bennett, representatives of the drug-testing
industry, and others who continue to treat the "cost of drug abuse to
industry" as a scientifically established fact.
Anyway, Walsh says he has other evidence demonstrating the urgent
need for workplace testing. He and another NIDA official edited and a
published a 340-page collection of studies called: Drugs in the
Workplace. When I interviewed Walsh recently, he drew my attention to
three studies in particular--one done by the Navy and two by electric-
power utilities-- that he said showed that drug users make poor 
employees.
Let's start with the Navy study. The primary subjects were 500 recruits
who tested positive for marijuana in 1985 and were admitted anyway
(those who tested positive for any other illegal drug were rejected).
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