Drug Testing in Indiana Job Training Program

As is the case with many jobs these days, drug testing beforehand is becoming routine for applicants to an Indiana job training program. State officials are viewing the testing as a successful screening method, as 2 percent of the applicants for the program were turned down after they received negative results.

Workforce Development Commissioner Mark Everson said that questions had been raised as to why people would be allowed to join this program that would not be able to pass the workplace screening. It didn’t seem fair, and it didn’t seem to be a way to protect others enrolled in the same program.

The program has cost the state about $45,000 and it is the first state job training program to initiate it. "When people understand you're going to drug test them, they walk away," Everson said. "It discourages people from going through the process."

1,240 applicants were tested for marijuana, cocaine, opiates, the hallucinogen PCP and amphetamine and methamphetamine during the five months since the program was begun in July of 2011. Of those, 13 people (or 1 percent) failed, three refused to take the test and seven others’ tests were unusable.

Of course, there are those in the ACLU who think that any and all drug testing is unconstitutional and they are making it their business to fight such rules every time they come up anywhere in the USA. Ken Falk, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, believes that it violates the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. One has to wonder what the founding fathers might have thought if they could have even imagined someone examining a person’s urine for evidence of a crime! The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there are exceptions to the Fourth Amendment protections if there are safety concerns.

"So the question is: What is the special need justifying this search? It's our contention there is no such need to impose a constitutional event, a search, on people in these jobs programs. So our concern is it's a Fourth Amendment violation," Falk said.

On the other side of the fence, people ask why the state should spend the money training people to do a job if they are just going to be weeded out by their drug addiction afterwards. If jobs are going to test people, then it only seems reasonable that a job training program should do the same.