Relationship between drug-use and a drug-testing policy in a military population

Background: The U.S Department of Defense requires the military to carry out drug testing on Soldiers. The intent of the program is to deter Soldiers from illicit drug use. The details of the policy are developed and executed by different branches of the military. There is currently no published data on the relationship between the drug testing policy in the Army and drug use by Soldiers.

Methods: The study sought to identify the correlation between implementation of drug-testing policy and the incidence of drug-positives within multiple cohorts (e.g. Army units). Using a Poisson regression model, we examined the association between  incidences of drug positives within each cohort and the incidences of drug testing for each cohort, predictability of each cohort’s testing schedule, total number of Soldiers within each cohort, and the type of testing (ie. random, commander’s directed etc.) conducted by each cohort while controlling for demographics.

Results: In a sample size of 459,962 drug tests among 3827 cohorts over the first three months of 2014, we observe that overall implementation of Army drug-testing policy does not correlate with incidences of drug positives. Rather, as the unpredictability of random testing increases the number of incidences of drug positives increase (β=0.9086, p<0.0001) and as the total number of random tests increase the incidences of drug positive increase (β=0.378, p<0.0001).

Conclusions: These results suggest that strict implementation of Army policy leads to increased detection of drug-use; however, further studies are needed to determine the efficacy of drug-testing as a deterrent for drug-use.