Most of the millions of drug screens performed in the US each year come back negative. A small but growing fraction, however, come back positive. And a rapidly increasing number show signs of tampering. Indeed, US workers are cheating on drug tests at the highest rate in decades, according to a leading drug-testing lab, which uncovered tens of thousands of tampered drug screens last year. Of 5.5 million drug screens collected from the general US workforce, 31,000 showed signs of tampering, according to Quest Diagnostics. "It's something that employers, employees, and all of us should be worried about," an official at the National Safety Council tells the Wall Street Journal.
- Test swaps: The most common method of tampering was substituting a worker's urine sample with urine from a friend or pet. Swaps were detected in 6,000 samples for a 633% increase from 2022 and "the highest rate ever recorded by the company," per the Journal.