Employers are increasingly concerned about illicit drugs in the workplace.
Besides being illegal, drug abuse is costly in many ways, from lost productivity to frequent accidents. The military combines mandatory random drug testing and zero tolerance, an especially aggressive approach relatively rare elsewhere in the economy. Indeed, drug use by military personal and civilian workers mirrored one another before the military instituted drug-testing in 1981. Yet now, drug abuse among military workers is far less prevalent than among their civilian counterparts. Surveys suggest that employees in the military are about 16 percent less likely to report using drugs in the past year than their civilian counterparts.