A new study from the Trucking Alliance and the University of Central Arkansas uses hair drug testing results from Trucking Alliance member carriers to suggest that drivers actually use cocaine more than marijuana, and that hair testing would essentially double the number of drivers disqualified for drug use.
The report, spearheaded by Trucking Alliance Managing Director Lane Kidd, looks at data from urine testing from the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse in December 2020 and compares it to four years of Trucking Alliance urine and hair testing results to advocate for the FMCSA allowing hair testing in lieu of urine testing, and to allow hair tests into the Clearinghouse record.
The Trucking Alliance, which was among large-fleet and other groups that successfully lobbied Congress to legislate the ELD mandate in 2012, also supported the FAST Act of 2015, which instructed the DOT to recognize hair testing. However, the Department of Health and Human Services has yet to write guidelines for implementation.
Trucking Alliance's new report intends to "continue to beat the drum and get some general public awareness that we do have a drug abuse problem in the trucking industry," said Lane Kidd, the group's managing director. "The big trucking associations don’t want to talk about it because they think it harms the image of the industry. But we're not trying to harm the industry's image, it's just a big public safety risk."
“Our research found that DOT is seriously under-reporting the actual use of harder drugs by truck drivers, such as cocaine and illegal opioids,” Doug Voss, professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management at the University of Central Arkansas, wrote in a news release. “Our analysis clearly concludes that hair testing identifies these harder drugs at higher percentages than the single urine testing method relied on by the federal government.”
Trucking Alliance's conclusion – that hair testing yields more positive tests for hard drugs like cocaine, opioids and meth – draws on the fact that these drugs aren't observable in urine samples more than a few days after drug use, whereas marijuana metabolites can appear in urine samples for up to 30 days following usage.
Trucking Alliance then extrapolates the hair testing findings – which show cocaine use as slightly more common than marijuana among 288,495 mostly pre-employment hair tests conducted by member carriers – to the general trucking population of millions, using 2020's Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse data as the comparison point.
