Drug and alcohol testing and the driver shortage

Fleets and their compliance officers and other industry stakeholders almost universally sing the praises of the federal Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse (DAC). They like its obvious contributions to safety and the peace of mind that the clearinghouse and its mandated regimen of driver testing gives them.

In this age of sky-high premiums and “nuclear verdicts,” they also like that insurance underwriters seem to be rewarding fleets for strict compliance and even that haulers are hiring safety specialists to, among other jobs, help oversee the onboarding process and make sure drivers know the dangers of being high behind the wheel and of getting busted for such behavior.

However, examine the monthly federal drug and alcohol test results, which in droves exclude drivers who might otherwise be qualified, and one question does come to mind: Might the clearinghouse be too successful, at least where the nationwide truck driver shortage is concerned?

A leading trucking trade group, American Trucking Associations (ATA), says the shortage sits at 80,000 drivers and counting and could reach 160,000 by the end of this decade. But who could argue with the sobriety of the drivers who do remain on the road?

From those whom FleetOwner interviewed, the answer is the driver shortage can’t be solved easily or quickly, but the contribution to safety of the system of drug and alcohol testing can’t be denied, either.

Clearinghouse numbers tell a story

According to federal law, when a commercial driver’s license (CDL) or a commercial learner’s permit (CLP) holder tests positive for a banned substance and has this recorded with the clearinghouse, he or she must cease “safety-sensitive” tasks—such as operating a commercial vehicle—until they go through and clear the return-to-duty (RTD) process, which depending on a driver’s issues with substances can be a years-long process. The most common drug test is done by sampling urine, though some stakeholders in the industry still push for hair testing, which is viewed as more accurate.

The numbers are updated and steadily climb monthly, but since Jan. 6, 2020, when the clearinghouse took effect, 106,037 drug violations have been reported among CDL/CLP holders—apart from alcohol—including 14,628 people who outright refused testing and thus disqualified themselves from driving. Also, during this same period, 2,416 alcohol violations were reported, which includes 542 people who refused testing.

The drugs included: marijuana; cocaine; methamphetamine; amphetamines; the opioids oxymorphone, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and hydromorphone; morphine; codeine (commonly used in prescription cough syrup but widely abused); 6-acetylmorphone (a metabolite of heroin); phencyclidine (known as PCP or angel dust); MDMA (ecstasy or “Molly”); and the psychedelic drug MDA (also known as “Sally”).

Marijuana—legal now in 18 states and the District of Columbia but still prohibited by the clearinghouse because of its potential to impair drivers—was far and away the drug of choice among CDL/CLP holders after January 2020 with 58,904 positive results. The next but very distant illegal drug was cocaine with 16,218 positives. Meth accounted for the third highest cause of positive tests with 9,940. More than 3.8 million drivers have been screened since the inception of the clearinghouse in January 2020.

Texas is the state with the most violations among CDL/CLP holders, 10,359, followed by California, with 7,703. The fewest have been in Washington, D.C., with 122. Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee, Missouri, and Alabama were the top quarter of states in number of violations since the inception of the clearinghouse.

Positives outweigh the drivers disqualified

“If it’s a choice between an empty truck and having a drug-impaired driver, we’ll take an empty truck,” said Dan Horvath, who oversaw safety for a fleet but now is VP of safety policy for ATA, a federation of trucking associations that normally opposes anything—most notably the recent federal COVID-19 vaccine-or-test mandate—that might exacerbate the truck driver shortage.

However, Horvath said, the Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse might be sacrosanct.

“We are absolutely a champion of the [clearinghouse]. We advocated for it before its inception,” he said during a recent interview with FleetOwner.

“A few times here recently, because we’ve cited clearinghouse numbers, it was taken in the context of we don’t support it. That’s not the case—at all. We continue to support it.”

Horvath made sure to point out that the DAC is not intended to end drivers’ careers; it’s supposed to get them on the path to sobriety—at least when they are behind the wheel of a truck (a typical Class 8 weighs at least 33,000 lb. empty and even more loaded) hurtling down the highway.

The federal clearinghouse does have “an impact on the driver shortage,” he conceded, “[but excluded drivers] can maybe come back to help us.”

Newman Carriers, a hazmat hauler based in Fairmont City, Illinois, near St. Louis, is a fleet that begins its driver onboarding process by emphasizing the great responsibility of piloting a commercial vehicle that weighs tons and travels fast—and the profound danger of doing so while drunk or high.

“When I discuss this with new hires, I hit home with it. I bring the family element into place. We review the value of life and how having someone on a substance in a fully loaded semi-tractor and trailer is equivalent to an 80,000-ton bullet [going] down the interstate,” Newman Carriers’ Dana Achartz explained in an email to FleetOwner.

It’s her job, as Newman Carriers’ safety and compliance director, to make these speeches and educate prospective drivers of the impact on their lives and livelihoods of positive test results. Working in her 16th year in trucking safety, Achartz warns them to avoid these blemishes—at all costs.

“We discuss how using drugs, alcohol, and other substances impair a driver’s reaction time and [how they increase] the possibility of a crash or fatality. I tell the drivers I don’t want someone like this on the roads with my family [and] my friends,” she added.

“Drivers who choose to use drugs and illegal substances and drive in our industry truly put our loved ones and themselves in harm’s way. No one wants to take someone’s life or their own because of a short-time high. No ‘good time or feeling’ is worth the lifelong agony of a bad decision,” Achartz said.

During a separate video interview with FleetOwner, Achartz said Newman runs clearinghouse queries on drivers monthly—much more frequently than the annual inquiries that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) requires of motor carriers.

“We are the biggest fans and advocates of [the clearinghouse system],” she explained. “We don’t want anybody who is driving for us on an illegal substance. We remind our drivers of the importance of safety first and to stay clean as it’s not worth your career.”

Because of the dangerous nature of the cargo that Newman Carriers hauls, Achartz said her small fleet (65 trucks) has a zero-tolerance policy. If you pop a positive drug test, you won’t drive again for Newman, even if you clear the RTD process and return to good standing as far as the federal government is concerned.

Achartz related the story of a driver who had been onboarded at Newman and went through the company’s driver training. But it was discovered that he had tested positive on a pre-employment screen for another carrier after he started with Newman and the initial pre-employment clearinghouse query was run. Because of its zero-tolerance policy, Newman had to let that driver go. “Our ‘marriage’ was off to a good start with this driver, but there was nothing we could have done,” she explained.

“That’s one imperfection we discovered with the clearinghouse,” Achartz added. “There was no way for us to identify that this driver had a positive result, after he started with us, until we would’ve run the annual query a year later. To prevent future risks on the road within our fleet, we now run the queries monthly.”

What happens after a positive test

The clearinghouse is a secure online database that gives employers, FMCSA, state licensing agencies, and state law enforcement personnel real-time information about a CDL/CLP holder’s drug and-alcohol test status. Drivers registered with the DAC can access their own records electronically—at no cost.

All CDL holders who must operate commercial vehicles on public roads and their employers and service agents are required to register with the DAC, according to FMCSA. If you drive for a fleet, that fleet must register you with the clearinghouse. If you’re an independent owner-operator, you navigate the process yourself. All interstate and intrastate motor carriers, including passenger carriers, school bus drivers, construction equipment operators, limo drivers, and municipal vehicle operators must sign up.

Once a driver has a violation recorded with the clearinghouse, he or she must stop performing “safety-sensitive” jobs, truck driving. The driver goes into the RTD process and must get help from a substance abuse professional (SAP), who has access to the clearinghouse and reports on whether the driver is following counseling requirements and a testing schedule.

This professional decides how long a driver must be tested, which can go on for up to five years. The SAP also can determine how often a driver is tested (at least six times in the year after the violation and for which substances). If an SAP finds a driver has satisfactorily completed the RTD process, the driver can get behind the wheel again.

The costs of testing positive add up, according to various sources: $400 to $500 for the initial evaluation from the substance counselor; for multiple tests, which are $30 to $60 each; and at least $700 per year to stay in the SAP program for counseling, treatment, and testing.

Then there’s the stigma of a positive test, even if a driver rightfully has been returned, because testing records stay with the clearinghouse for up to five years, Achartz noted. “It’s not something you want following you around,” she added.

And there’s a danger for fleets that take on a driver with a prior positive test result, Horvath said, if that trucker has returned to duty only to be involved in a costly or fatal accident, after which litigants might discover the past violation. In court, “they’re going to paint a picture that the carrier has done something wrong [by employing a driver with a violation in the past], when in fact they haven’t. It’s something the carrier is going to have to weigh, the risk,” he said.

This gets to the question of whether fleets should have zero-tolerance policies, he added. Some fleets, Horvath said, that don’t opt for a zero-tolerance stance can have five-, seven-, or 10-year standards for when they would re-employ a driver who’s had a clearinghouse violation.

The impact of pot

Some nationwide argue that pot should be legal since marijuana is already starting to become as prevalent in U.S. culture as alcohol.

The movement to legalize marijuana in even more states beyond the current 18 does worry trucking companies, said Newman Carriers safety director Achartz. “I’m not a fan of pot legalization. It’s little wonder that marijuana has the most positives.”

ATA’s Horvath said: “State legalization is an issue. Nothing has changed from the [U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT)] perspective. It’s still a prohibited substance. Just because you live in a state where marijuana is legal doesn’t mean you’re exempt from the DOT testing regimen.”

Does the “old-school” trucking industry move away from anything but an absolute ban on marijuana use? “I don’t even think we can have those discussions until we have a thorough roadside testing system for marijuana,” he said, like there is with law enforcement for alcohol. “The key is testing for impairment.”

“We want more meaningful discussions on impairment standards,” Horvath added. “Keep in mind this isn’t just trucking. The standards apply to rail, the airline industry, etc.”

Partners in alcohol-detection technology

When stakeholders in the industry think about the Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouses, the “Alcohol” part often is forgotten—since most of the drugs on the testing list are illegal.

However, FleetOwner 500 long-haul freight transportation and intermodal and logistics services company Schneider and the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety (ACTS) are partnering on the largest trial deployment of the In-Vehicle Alcohol Detection System to date, bringing it a step closer to the marketplace, Schneider and ACTS announced on Dec. 8.

The technology was developed through the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) program, a public-private partnership between major automakers and USDOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to invent, test, commercialize, and deploy new alcohol-detection technologies in vehicles, including commercial vehicles.

Schneider is the first truckload carrier to work with the DADSS program. An industry leader in truck-safety technology, according to a release about the alcohol detection system, Schneider implemented speed limiters in the 1980s and has continued to be an early adopter of other safety technology such as stability control systems, electronic logging devices, collision mitigation systems, and forward- and side-mounted video cameras.

“Safety comes first at Schneider, always, and we believe in going above and beyond industry standards. We look forward to the opportunity to pilot groundbreaking safety technology developed to help save lives,” said Tom DiSalvi, Schneider’s VP of safety, driver training, and compliance. “We know our team of professional drivers will embrace this technology because, just as with previous safety enhancements, they will be part of a solution that will make our highways safer.”

As part of this new trial deployment, Schneider will outfit eight of its cabs with the latest breath sensors, logging more than 100,000 sensor miles for each vehicle outfitted, for a collective total of almost 1 million miles.

The pilot program will help refine the technology by increasing the stress that the system is put under on the road, exponentially increasing the number of miles driven and exposing the system to new drivers and a wider range of environmental conditions—all key to the DADSS program’s quest to commercialize fully passive vehicle-integrated breath technology.

The collaboration will be carried out through the Driven to Protect Initiative with the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. Since 2018, Virginia has been helping to test in-vehicle alcohol detection technology that will determine if a driver is impaired with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) at or above the applicable legal limit in Virginia—and prevent the vehicle from moving.

“As a national leader in safety innovation, a collaboration with Schneider is ideal for helping expand the DADSS program’s on-road testing, and we look forward to putting the breath system through hundreds of thousands of real-world operating miles as part of this trial deployment.” said Rob Strassburger, who is president and CEO of ACTS.

“This wouldn’t be possible without the support we’ve received from Virginia—the first state to step forward and conduct in-vehicle test trials on its roads. Because of their dedication to technology and innovation, the DADSS breath system has gone from an early prototype to a viable safety feature for all vehicles in the future.”

The Dec. 8 announcement also builds on one by ACTS that the first product has come out of the DADSS research lab and is being made available for open licensing for use in commercial vehicles. This first-generation breath system will be used by fleet operators implementing a zero-tolerance alcohol policy for their drivers. Additional product updates are planned, with a goal of releasing a new product update every 18 months over the next four years. A consumer version of the breath-testing system is expected by 2024 and a touch system by 2025.

Congress included these technologies in the new Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which President Biden signed into law on Nov. 16 and lays out a process for deploying advanced alcohol- and drug-impaired driving prevention technology. The DADSS technology suite remains widely accepted as the most promising and expedient pathway to prevent drunk-driving fatalities on a large scale, according to the Dec. 8 announcement.

According to a study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, when widely deployed in all vehicles, such an alcohol detection system could help eliminate the No. 1 cause of fatalities on U.S. roadways and save more than 9,000 lives each year.