Early Americans deeply hated these general searches, which were a leading cause of the Revolution. After the Revolution, when memories of the experience with warrantless searches were still fresh, the Fourth Amendment was adopted. It says that the government cannot search everyone to find the few who might be guilty of an offense. The government must have good reason to suspect a particular person before subjecting him or her to intrusive body searches. These longstanding principles of fairness should also apply to the private sector, even though the Fourth Amendment only applies to government action.
Urine tests are body searches, and they are an unprecedented invasion of privacy.
The standard practice, in administering such tests, is to require employees to urinate in the presence of a witness to guard against specimen tampering. Obviously, people who are responsible for others' lives should be held to high standards of job performance. But urine testing will not help employers do that because it does not detect impairment. If employers in transportation and other industries are really concerned about the public's safety, they should abandon imperfect urine testing and test performance instead. Computerassisted performance tests already exist and, in fact, have been used by NASA for years on astronauts and test pilots.