The relevance of drug testing in the workplace has different degrees of variability across the globe. The view of the importance of hair drug testing varies from one country to another. Hair drug testing is more applicable for developed countries that have more stringent laws in relation to the quality of work environment. Among developing countries, the value of drug tests is waning. The rational for hair drug testing in the workplace is ambiguous even in developed countries like the United States. In terms of monetary loss, the U.S. economy is losing more than US$ 250 billion each year written off as drug abuse cost, including about 500 million lost working days. The lost working days created by drug-abused employees are 66 percent greater than the absences incurred by healthy employees. While the United States has made parallel studies on the impact of drug abuse in the work place, other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada have also stepped up their efforts in understanding the drug problem. In the UK, between 11 million and 17 million working days are lost each year, costing the UK economy as much as 1.8 billion pounds per year. Drug abuse is highly related to work efficiency in Canada where the economy is losing $400 million in lost productivity. Thus the primacy of hair drug testing in the workplace is more critical in countries looking to cut its economic costs. Hair drug testing is relatively new in the United States. However, other countries have yet to catch up with this trend especially in applying these drug tests to regulate the workplace. However, the phenomenon is catching up. UK courts have acknowledged hair drug testing as a basis for irrefutable evidence. Countries such as Belgium and Finland believe that privacy is an indivisible right above the mechanisms of drug testing in the workplace. Countries in Europe have also experienced increase in demand for drug tests. However, hair drug testing is casted in a negative light. Studies have shown that dark haired individuals are more likely to test positive than light-haired individuals. Therefore, the need to validate such test results by using other methods other than hair drug testing is important especially in Europe where there are ethical issues that is being pushed in the forefront. The advantage of hair drug testing is longer detection rates as compared to urine drug tests. However, the belief that there is a probability of false positive in hair drug testing can be a cause of concern in nations who value the rights of employees. While drug testing is slowly catching up there are still structural hindrances and cultural values that governs a country's ethical standards on such issues.
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