One blogger seems to think so. Read below the article I found:
Why Pre-employment alcohol testing is such a bad idea:
The use of drugs and alcohol in the workplace and by the work force is costing American corporations billions of dollars in lost productivity, accidents, and excess health care costs. Many organizations are now using pre-employment tests in an attempt to minimize their exposure to substance abuse. This trend is especially evident in the transportation industry, where federal regulations require that individuals who hold or apply for "safety sensitive" positions complete pre-employment breath alcohol tests.(1)
Although eliminating alcohol and other drugs of abuse from the workplace is a worthy goal, pre-employment alcohol testing will do little to advance it. To understand why pre-employment alcohol testing is unlikely to work, it is necessary to consider what these tests actually measure, the failure rates for these tests, and how the costs of such tests stack up against the probable benefits.
ALCOHOL TESTING METHODS
Alcohol testing technologies can be broken down into two general categories. A number of bioassay methods use breath, urine, blood, saliva, or hair samples to provide evidence for the presence or absence of alcohol in the bloodstream. An alternative is to use behavioral assessments to detect and diagnose drug or alcohol-related impairment.
Breath alcohol analysis is the method of choice in a number of settings, such as law enforcement and the transportation industry. Current generation breath-alcohol analyzers generally have excellent accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and selectivity or specificity for ethanol in breath samples. Studies have demonstrated significant relationships between breath alcohol and impairment of driving skills, hand steadiness, eye movements, and subjective feelings of intoxication. Urine testing (using gas chromatography/ mass spectrometry) is considered one of the most reliable and valid methods of testing for drugs and alcohol in urine, yielding accuracy levels of 99.7 percent when conducted in labs by qualified personnel. However, several reviews--Sonnestuhl et al. (1987), Loomis (1990), and Normand, Lempert, and O'Brien (1994)-suggest that urinalysis results do not indicate the quantity of alcohol consumed, when it was consumed, or whether the subject is a chronic abuser of the drug.
Rather than inferring blood alcohol concentration on the basis of breath or urine samples, it might be preferable to directly measure the level of alcohol in a person's bloodstream. Analysis of blood samples for drugs or their metabolytes involves relatively invasive collection methods, requires trained personnel to perform the collection, and requires more sophisticated analysis techniques than urine testing. However, because of the strong relationship between blood alcohol levels and the effects of alcohol on the nervous system, most experts regard blood tests for alcohol as the forensic benchmark against which other methods should be validated.
Saliva has also been shown to be an appropriate specimen for determining the presence of alcohol. This method typically involves collecting samples on strips or swabs that turn various colors when exposed to alcohol. However, cutoff levels that would provide reliable measurement of either the presence of alcohol or alcohol-related impairment using saliva samples have not yet been established.
Another biologically based testing technology involves analyses of hair samples. Trace amounts of drug molecules that have circulated through the blood stream will be found in the follicle of the hair in amounts that are roughly proportional to those ingested. Further, such drug traces will remain in the hair as it grows and are not likely to diminish over time. Unlike detection in urine or blood, detection of drug or alcohol use in hair analysis cannot be avoided by abstention for days prior to the test or by attempts at adulteration.
Unlike bioassay methods, behavioral techniques are intended to assess level of impairment rather than mere exposure. The Drug Evaluation and Classification Program (DEC) is the most commonly used behavioral assessment. It is designed to determine whether an individual is impaired, the likely cause of the impairment (drags, medical condition, and so forth), and, if impairment is drug-related, the likely category or combination of drugs involved.
The DEC examination typically includes a breath-alcohol test, eye examination for horizontal and vertical nystagmus (involuntary twitching) as well as convergence (or lack thereof), divided attention psychological tests, vital sign examination, pupillary size and responsiveness evaluation, evaluation of muscle tone, and examination for injection sites. DEC may have potential application in the work context in "reasonable cause" situations as a way to identify performance decrements and to confirm whether the identified problems are caused by drug or alcohol use on the job.
A variety of computer-based behavioral tests have also been developed to evaluate impairment due to drug or alcohol use. Such tests generally assess an individual's ability to detect or discriminate different stimuli, motor ability, psychomotor skill, learning, memory, and decision making. Behavioral assessment techniques are most effective when the subject is highly impaired and have limited effectiveness when used to identify low-dose impairment.
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