10 Biggest Companies That Drug Test

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The 10 biggest companies that drug test include some of the largest companies in the world as well as some of the world’s largest employers.

Drug testing by employers is a controversial practice, with many people believing it to be a violation of privacy. Those people are of the mind that so long as the employee abstains from doing drugs at work or coming to work high, that it should not be an employer’s concern whether or not they engage in drug use on their own time, even should that drug use be illegal.

Naturally, many employers disagree. They believe that while an employee’s drug use may very well be contained to their private life initially, that use could eventually spiral out of control and lead to the employee missing time, seeing their job performance decline, and/or leading to drug use at work. Some states have even instituted drug testing of welfare recipients, with those who test positive being denied benefits.

Despite the controversy, drug testing is on the rise in the workplace. According to Statistic Brain, 56% of U.S employers now require pre-employment drug tests, while 29% of private employers make use of random drug testing. The majority of the testing done is through urine testing, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that 9.1 million employee urine tests were conducted in 2014 by Quest Diagnostics Inc (NYSE:DGX) alone, with 3.9% of those tests coming back positive.

Marijuana, one of the 10 least addictive drugs, is the drug most commonly found in drug testing, appearing in 2% of tests, while amphetamines, prescription opiates, and meth were each found in around 1% of the tests. The meth figures (0.85%) were surprisingly high, given that it only takes about 72 hours before meth use won’t show up in a urine test (while marijuana use can be detected in urine as much as two months after the most recent puff, in the case of a formerly heavy user), and given that only 0.2% of Americans reported having used meth in the last month according to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

While some people may contend that drug testing shouldn’t even be legal or is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the reality is that it is legal, and not only is it legal, but companies are incentivized to do it by both insurance companies and the government itself in most jurisdictions. Perhaps the most sobering fact of all is that even in states where marijuana use is now legal, companies can still test for and fire employees for marijuana use if they so desire.

In this article, we set out to find the 10 biggest companies that drug test, so our readers know what to expect on their job hunt (or from their current employer) and who they may or may not want to send a copy of their CV to. We started from the top of the market cap ladder (Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), which does not drug test), and worked our way down until we had found the 10 biggest companies that drug test, based on market cap. Check out the list beginning on the next page.

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