Joe Reilly on Drug Testing in America
Curious about the drug screening industry? Looking to get your start in a rewarding career? Trying to navigate the changing landscape of federal and state laws and how they influence your companies drug testing policy? If you have leaned in for any of these questions then you have found the podcast you have been looking for. Join Joe Reilly on this informative and educational adventure in drug screening in America.
Joe Reilly on Drug Testing in America
Safety vs. Legalization: The Future Employers Must Choose
A few crashes and one landmark act quietly rewired American workplaces: safety-sensitive jobs needed real guardrails. We sit down with Bill Current—consultant, author, and longtime industry leader—to map how drug testing grew from crisis response to a complex, compliance-driven system that still protects people today. From the Exxon Valdez era to the Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act, Bill explains why DOT rules became the blueprint for nearly every strong program and how that foundation still shapes policy, training, and defensibility.
We dig into the real maze employers face now: thousands of state statutes, regulations, and court decisions layered with fast-changing marijuana laws. Can you still test for cannabis? Yes—but what you can do with a positive depends on where you operate and how the test detects use. We get practical on policy architecture for single-state and multi-state employers, the power of addendums, and when DOT preemption overrides restrictive state language. Then we turn to oral fluid testing—why parent-THC detection, shorter windows, and on-site collections make it a game changer for post-accident and reasonable suspicion cases.
Bill also pulls back the curtain on the DOT Legends, a new resource channeling former federal and modal leaders to give employers and TPAs rapid, authoritative answers on Clearinghouse rules, audits, and complex compliance questions. The throughline is clear: abandoning testing is a risky bet as post-accident positivity rises and liability expands. Smarter testing—faster, targeted, and legally sound—wins. If you care about safety, cost, and culture, this conversation gives you the roadmap: update your policy, train supervisors well, consider oral fluid for recent use, and secure reliable compliance support.
Enjoyed the conversation? Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a colleague who manages safety or compliance. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners who need clear guidance on drug testing in America.
This is another episode of Joe Riley on Drug Testing in America, episode nine, with your guest, Bill Current, drug testing industry expert. Now your host, Joe Riley.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Jesse. I'm excited to be here. We have an exciting show today with a great guest, a friend of mine, a business colleague, a mentor. We have Mr. Bill Current, founder and CEO of the Current Consulting Group. So welcome, Bill.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you, Joe. It's good to be with you. Thank you for asking me. This is fun.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So, Bill, we have a lot to discuss, and we can get into that in just a minute or so. Let's have uh Jesse first introduced our sponsor, which is your company, the current consulting group.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, the current consulting group, welcome. Thank you so much for your partnership of this episode. Uh we'll let everybody know that the current consulting group offers drug testing industry consultants with compliance and marketing support. So if you're uh looking to learn what can uh I'll start over. The current consulting group is our partner for this episode. They offer expert drug testing, uh industry consultants with compliance and marketing support. CCG provides policy, state drug testing laws, and training in person and online. Custom consulting projects are also available, including mock audits for DOT compliance and expert witness testimony. CCG recently expanded their offerings with what they call the DOT Legends, which Joe and Bill will discuss more about later in this podcast. So welcome, current consulting group.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Great. Thanks, Jesse. And just uh for future reference, it's it's DOT Legends. I know it looks like DOT, but it's Department of Transportation, the acronym DOT. So we're good there. Uh thank you, Bill, for uh the current consulting group sponsoring our episode today. My pleasure. Thank you. Awesome. So, Bill, we got a lot to discuss today. You and I go back, oh, I know it's over 30 years, right? Yep. Okay. So I I put together a list of topics and uh we'll kind of try and stay on task here. We're gonna talk uh ask you to talk a little bit about yourself, uh your early start in the industry, talk about your book that you published years ago called Why Drug Testing. I want to ask you and talk about how and why did American businesses actually get started with drug testing? Well, really Let me let me just go with the uh agenda and then we'll we'll we'll circle back to all these items. We're gonna cover state laws, marijuana, big, big topic. Uh I want to ask you, Bill, about the evolution of current consulting group. I want to ask you about your your newest big exciting thing called the DOT legends, and then kind of close out with changes over the years. Where do we think we are today and where do you think we're going? Um So, with that, Bill, um let's ask you to give us a brief introduction, a little bit about yourself and your early start in the industry and the book why drug testing. Sure.
SPEAKER_02:Well, out of college, I uh was very fortunate to get a job working for the Price Club, which is was the predecessor to Costco.
SPEAKER_00:I remember those guys. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And I was working at headquarters in San Diego, California, and was the editor of a magazine that we put out called the Price Club Journal. So I got to work with some really smart people early in my professional career who knew a lot about marketing and sales and the whole concept behind these, you know, big warehouse stores. And it was a great education. And while I was doing that, I used to convince people in Washington, D.C., to write articles for us, uh senators' offices, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Small Business Business Administration, et cetera. And that led to somebody at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinking I would be great for a job that they they had an opening for. It was uh staff director at a coalition they had just started called the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace. And I interviewed for the job and and eventually was offered the position, moved our little family out to uh the Washington, D.C. area, and that's how I got involved with the the world of drug testing. Drug testing was still very much in its infancy in the late 1980s, and one of our main objectives through the Institute for Drug-Free Workplace was to get some of the restrictive state drug testing laws that had been enacted over the last few years changed to become more employer-friendly, and then to enact new drug testing laws in other states that were supportive of employers' rights to have drug-free workplace programs. I went from that position, I was eventually promoted to director of the institute, and then from there I became the executive director of the American Council for Drug Education, also in Washington, D.C., and then took a position as the vice president of consulting for a third-party administrator in the drug testing business called Employee Information Services. That was one of many companies gobbled up by, you know, the uh the big roll-ups that were going on back in the um mid-late 90s. This one was a choice point acquisition. And so I left that company in 1998 and uh started the current consulting group. And we've been in business now for 27 years.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. And so the early start with the Chamber of Commerce, uh U.S. Chamber of Commerce, what what year was that, Bill?
SPEAKER_02:Well, they started the Institute, I think, in 88. Okay. And I went to work for them in 89. Okay. Um and then in 1990 we spun off and became a a separate independent organization. Um and and it was a good experience to go through that. Um, it led to the opportunity with the American Council, which was an even better opportunity for my career. Uh, the American Council for Drug Education was really the oldest sort of drug education, anti-drug use uh association that existed at that time. And that was also a great experience. I met a lot of people through that position that eventually led to the opportunities I've had when I've after I started my own business.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So in those two organizations, were they encouraging American businesses to implement drug-free workplace programs?
SPEAKER_02:Well, at the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace, absolutely yes. The board of directors of the Institute was really a who's who a Fortune 50 company, senior executives from Chevron, Exxon, uh Motorola, IBM, ABC. And those companies were very concerned at that time that employers continued to have the right to have drug fra drug testing programs in place. This was after the Exxon Valdez incident, where there was a lot of qu you know discussion about, you know, what should employers do, what rights do they have to prevent accidents like that from happening. And there were some very well-known accidents uh in the transportation industry that occurred in the late 1980s and into the early mid-90s that brought a lot of attention to the attention to the the issue of safety in transportation. And so out of those 1980 incidents, you had um, and I'm talking about the decade of the 80s, um, it was really sort of where the the DOT drug and alcohol testing regulation started. Uh it was later in the 90s, the early 90s, when Congress codified those regulations, and we've been living with them ever since. And so it wasn't as much a part of the mission of the American Council for Drug Education. It was more of a the that organization was more of an education-based group, but we had started a workplace um advisory board with a lot of the same people that were serving on the board of directors with the Institute, and there was a lot of discussion about, you know, what what can we do to protect employers' rights through education? That was really the the mission of that organization.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, very interesting. So you mentioned um working for a TPA, a third-party administrator, which is what my company, National Drug Screening Does, and oh, four or five hundred other companies around the around the uh United States that that we both know and and lots of those people. What do you think, like how did this industry of a drug testing TPA, how did how did this get going? How did this get started? Because like in the 70s and early 80s, you probably never heard of a drug testing TPA, right?
SPEAKER_02:No. The the the acronym TPA, you know, sort of came along in the 90s, but it was really sort of the result of employers needing more help managing their drug testing process. So if you think about a typical drug test, there's collection of a sample, and even before that, notifying an individual that they're going to be drug tested, sending them to a collection site to provide a uh in those days mostly a urine sample, today more common with oral fluid and hair testing as well. But the collection of the sample, sending the lab uh the sample to a laboratory, making sure that it gets analyzed if it's a presumptive positive, making sure the confirmation test takes place. Then through those DOT regulations, there was sort of the creation of the role of the medical review officer, the MRO, who would verify confirmed positives, and then the result the reporting of the results. So there's lots of different steps in the process. And for a drug test result to be 100% legally defensible, that process has to be perfect every time. There's no room for error. And so a lot of companies started asking their drug testing providers if they could handle all the different steps in that process. And that's where companies like your original company, Joe, Florida Drug Screening, that that that was one of the early pioneers in the world of TPA, the TPA side of the business. And I'll just tell the audience now, I advised you not to sell that company at the time. It was you your brand was so good. And so a few years later, when you started national drug screening, I was very happy for you. But that's the role of the TPA, to make sure that process is seamless and it's perfect every time. And of course, mistakes do happen, but if employers had to manage that process themselves, especially big companies that are doing perhaps hundreds of thousands of drug tests a year, there would be a lot more errors. There would be a lot more mistakes. It would just be so challenging for a company, a large company, to keep track of it all. And in the case of smaller companies, they just don't have the staffing or the expertise to do it. And so that's where a TPA like national drug screening comes into place.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, great. So you started uh you got out of the uh work with the Institute and uh the council, and you started your own consulting company. And I met you, I think it was 1997, at a Dacia conference, which is the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association back then, maybe 97, 98, I don't know. Do you remember?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I started the current consulting group, which we originally called WFC and Associates. I started that in September of 98.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So it must have been 98, the conference, and 98 or 99, and you were a speaker at the conference. Yeah. And I hadn't met you before. I met you as the speaker. And I can tell you, Bill, that um listening to you speak, okay, and being becoming part of Dacia was kind of one of the defining moments of me saying this is going to be my career.
SPEAKER_02:Oh.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Because I mean, I really didn't know anything about drug testing. I just kind of fell into it, and people paid me to help them set up drug testing, and okay, that's great. You know, I've been an entrepreneur and I had, you know, five other businesses prior to that in my life, and this became my 30-year career. And that was like a defining moment. But you were speaking, and you had a book you had just written called Why Drug Testing? And you asked the audience a question and said, you know, whoever gets the question right gets a copy of the book. And so you asked the question, I raised my hand, I didn't get picked. Okay. You asked another question, I raised my hand, I didn't get picked. Okay. And I really wanted that book. Okay. So when you got done speaking, I went up and introduced myself to you, and I kind of looked uh, you know, behind the podium and I saw you still had a couple of books left. And I said, Bill, it's really nice to meet you, and I really tried to answer one of your questions, but is there any way I didn't get a copy of that book? And you handed me the copy of that book, and that was that was just awesome. It was amazing. And tell us a little bit about the book, why drug testing? What was the purpose and how was it received? Sure.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and let me say that unpaid invoice for that book is still in our system, so we're five bucks a year.
SPEAKER_00:But I did buy a thousand copies one year.
SPEAKER_02:You did. You made up for it, no. Um well, up to that point, I had I had had nine books published on drug testing, drug-free workplace issues. I had written a book the year before called Um Creating a Family Policy Against Drugs, uh, which I did, I co-wrote with Howard Taylor out of Nashville. And so I had been writing books, um, but when I started the current consulting group in 98, I didn't have any clients, nothing. And so I thought, you know, I've got all this time on my hands, I don't have a client yet, um, I and I need something to really promote and highlight my my expertise. And so I started writing why drug testing, and I'll tell you, um it was very, very popular from the very beginning, but it almost didn't get printed. I went to a local printer in Coral Springs, Florida, where I live, and uh we worked out all the arrangements, and he said uh in the end, he said, okay, it's going to be whatever it was,$5,000 to print X number of copies. And I pulled out my credit card and he said, Well, we don't take credit cards. And I said, Well, what do you take? He said, Well, I'll take cash or I'll take a check. So I said, Well, I don't have any checks with me. So I went home. And back in those days, you know, you got these these uh what what do you call them, credit checks in the mail from the banks all the time, right? So I grabbed one of those, it had my name on it, I went back and I said, here's your check. And he looked at the check and he said, I've never seen a check that looks like this before. I said, Well, you asked for a check, and here it is. So he accepted it, thank heavens, because um we printed the first 5,000 copies and we went on to print, I forget, 150,000 copies of the book over the next few years. And you were kind enough to to make a big order. And that sort of became my calling card. I you know, that little trick that you you uh shared with the audience that, you know, anybody who can answer this question, I'll give them a free copy of the book. That became very popular. And so uh at lunch earlier today, I was telling Joe that I have a new book coming out called What Every Employer Should Know About Uh Marijuana. And I was speaking at the National Safety Council conference last week in Denver, and I did the same trick with him, except for now the book is not a printed copy of the book. It's a digital, uh it's an ebook, if you will. And but a lot of hands went up, and I'm giving a copy of that book to everybody who was in attendance at my session. So I've been I've been using that trick for years. I'm gonna give you a copy for free this time, Jack. I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_00:You could just do like a QR code and say, here's the QR code, and and you get the book digitally. So um, yeah, I wanted to bring up the book. I wanted to bring up, you know, how we met. And uh we've talked a little bit about American businesses getting started in drug testing. Back then, uh, were there state laws on drug testing? Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:The very first state laws came into existence around 1985-87. Interesting. And there were some, you know, very restrictive state laws. And um there was there were some good ones. There was Utah that passed a drug testing-friendly law. Um I think Georgia was right around that time. But some of them were very restrictive. Now, those early restrictive laws we were successful in changing through our lobbying efforts through the Institute for Drug-Free Workplace and through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But it took a lot of work to get to that point. Today there are uh actually not every State has a mandatory drug testing law, but every state either has a law or they've got case law. Like California, for example, doesn't actually have a statute on drug testing, but they've got a lot of case law, and then they recently uh amended their marijuana law, their legal marijuana law, to include some elements of drug testing in it. And that's the other thing that employers have to look for today, Joe. It's not just the drug testing laws, but it's the marijuana laws as well that may have language in them that affects either how an employer tests for marijuana or what they can do with a positive result.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I remember probably it's probably 10 years ago, it used to be, well, there's over 500 state laws about drug testing. What do you think it is today?
SPEAKER_02:It's easily over 2,000, maybe as much as 2,500, because we're counting not only the mandatory drug testing laws, but the voluntary laws like we have here in Florida that you and I have to live by if we want to qualify for a workers' comp premium discount. We have the workers' comp regulations, the unemployment comp regulations, and then all of the marijuana laws, and then we have the case law decisions as well. So it's a lot of different laws that you have to go by. And if you don't mind, Joe, I'm gonna give a little plug to something that we have at the current consulting group. It's called current compliance, and it's a subscription that companies can subscribe to on an annual basis that gives them access to all of those laws. And I know that's something that that uh National Drug Screening has been subscribing to for years, which we appreciate very much. But it it is a team effort to keep that database up to date. We're literally making changes every week to that database. We have um Yvette Baker, an attorney, and um Catherine Miller, who manages the database for us, that are working on that every week to keep it up to date.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's an awesome uh service that you offer. I was gonna ask you about that, so I'm glad you brought it up. Um but you've you've actually almost become the the leader in that uh in the industry with the subscription-based uh product where, you know, in minutes I can look up a state and I can understand those laws. So we really appreciate using uh your state subscription on state laws. And you mentioned Florida, where w we both live. I live here in Melbourne, Florida, and I know you're down in Coral Springs, which is the first town I lived in when I moved to Florida. But one of the things that actually the the thing that prompted me to get in the drug testing industry was when Florida passed their voluntary law on workers' comp discounts for companies that implemented a comprehensive drug-free workplace program. That's what got me thinking that this is a business where we can help employers save money when they implement a drug-free workplace program.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And you know, the amazing thing about the the dozen or so states that have these uh voluntary laws is that well for one thing, outside of the voluntary law, if you're not part of that program, if you didn't qualify or you chose not to participate, then typically in those states there are no restrictions on your drug testing program. But especially for small companies, medium-sized companies, any company that's not self-insured, it it's a no-brainer. You you should be in that program because you're gonna save money on your workers' comp uh premiums that's gonna offset the cost of your drug testing program. And and I wrote a book, my the very first book I ever had published when I was still at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was called A Guide to State Drug Testing Laws and Legislation. And back in those days in 1990, I had all the laws memorized. There were like 16. Somebody could call me on the phone and ask me about Kansas or Iowa, and I could rattle it off from memory. But today, as you know, we mentioned there's over 2,000. I couldn't I couldn't begin to do that. You I'm sure you could you could advise somebody on the Florida law better than I could in the moment. Through the database, I can find all that information. But there's just so much. If you're a multi-state employer, there are so many nuances between the states. No two states have the exact same laws. And so it really behooves you to use an expert, not only a TPA to manage your program for you. I don't I don't know how companies do it without a TPA today, but also some type of access to that state law information because their clients are constantly calling with questions that actually have to be answered by referring to some type of you know database or source of the state law information.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So a question that comes to mind is how do these state laws interact with the federal DOT required testing for DOT regulated employers?
SPEAKER_02:Well, two things I'll say about that. One is that the DOT regulations have sort of become the blueprint for how most companies conduct drug testing, even if they're not covered by the DOT regulations. There's just a lot of good stuff in there that that helps to elevate the legal defensibility of a company's drug testing program. But it's important for employers to know that if you have a DOT if you're covered by any of the DOT modes, the Federal Motor Carrier, the uh FAA, FRA, etc., those DOT regulations preempt or trump any state laws. So if you're in a state, for example, that restricts um, say, random drug testing, but you're covered under the DOT regulations and these employees of your company fall under the DOT regulations, you still have to conduct random testing. The the federal regulations preempt any restrictions at the state level. This is a particularly important point when it becomes to the marijuana issues because you run into some states like California, for example, that passed a law not too long ago that prohibits employers from from acting on the result of a drug test that only reveals the presence of the non-psychoactive metabolite of cannabis. So that's what urine identifies. It it relies on identifying the metabolite of marijuana, in this case marijuana. However, and I I don't know if the authors of that bill thought that they were killing drug testing in their state altogether, but they left a big giant loophole in there for drug testing methods that identify the parent drug, not the metabolite, but parent THC, which is oral fluid testing. But if you're covered under the DOT regulations, you can still test. In fact, you have to use urine testing right now, today, to to do your DOT testing, because even though DOT has passed final regulations for lab-based oral fluid testing, we're still waiting for at least two laboratories to become certified to conduct those oral fluid tests. So right now the only testing method that you can use for DOT compliance is lab-based urine testing. Even if you're in a state like California that restricts testing for marijuana with urine, you still can do it. In fact, you have to do it with DOT testing.
SPEAKER_00:So for DOT uh regulated employers and they have DOT covered employees, they got to follow those DOT regulations regardless of those uh state drug testing laws. Absolutely. Okay. So two quick questions uh to uh kind of wrap up state laws is an employer operates in one state only, do they need to be concerned about state laws on drug testing?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Well, for one, you've got the state law that applies to you. Okay. Now, if you're in a state that has a mandatory law, let's say Iowa, um, and you're only in Iowa, your program must comply with the Iowa drug testing law. And you don't have to worry about any of the surrounding states because you're only in Iowa. But if you have employees who work and live in other states, then it's probable that the drug testing law or case law or other regulations in that state apply to those employees. So when you put a policy together, as you know, Joe, you put the base policy together, usually based on the company's home state, their headquarters state, and then you add addendums to the policy to cover any additional states that may have differing legal requirements.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that kind of almost answers the the last question I have on state laws is an employer operating in multiple states, maybe fifty states, how do they navigate all these state laws on drug testing?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's a good question, and it becomes challenging for big companies, right? So if you're in a company that uh is in thirty-five, forty, fifty states, you may need uh fifteen, twenty addendums to your base policy, depending on what's in the base policy and then what requirements or restrictions may apply in these other states. If you're in fifty states, it would be uh in fact, it's never happened in my, you know, all my years of writing drug testing policies that you need 49 addendums to the base policy. Usually you're gonna be able to include in that base policy most of the issues that are covered by those additional state laws. But there will be situations. The marijuana laws are a good example where, again, there are no two states with identical legal marijuana laws. Some of them apply to the workplace, some of them don't, but you're gonna include those in addendums to the base policy to make sure that in that state your company's in compliance with those applicable laws.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, great information to help the employer that's in just the one state and also the employer that could be in, like you said, 30, 40, or 50 states. Uh I want to switch gears. Uh I want to talk about marijuana. It's a huge topic in our industry. Uh we've mentioned it a couple of times. It's a huge topic for employers doing drug testing. Now we've we've talked about this before on this podcast. We had Phil Dubois, a good friend of both of ours, and he's on the uh government affairs committee for ENDESA, which is the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association, kind of what Dacia evolved into. Uh Phil's on that board, and and I know uh Bill, you're also serving on the board of ENDASA, correct? That's correct, yeah. All right. Well, that's great. So I don't want to spend a whole lot of time because we have a whole other hour podcast on marijuana. But real quick, Bill, let's start here. Can employers legally test employees for marijuana?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's a question we get asked regularly. And I, you know, I mentioned the book that I just wrote called What Every Employer Should Know About Marijuana. And one chapter is devoted to can you test for marijuana? Is it legal to test for marijuana? And I'm gonna say something that I know some of my friends in the industry are going to object to immediately, excuse me, which is that you can test for marijuana in all 50 states. And so I know some people who will raise their hand right now and say, well, that's not true in New York, or that's not true in Minneapolis, uh in Minnesota or California. But the fact of the matter is you can test for marijuana in all 50 states. Now, if you're covered under the DOT regulations, it doesn't matter what state you're in, you have to test for marijuana. It's one of the drugs on the DOT drug test panel. But even in New York, there are exceptions to the restrictions or the prohibition on testing for marijuana. You just have to read the regulations and the laws very carefully to see that they do allow testing for marijuana under certain circumstances. Generally speaking, I'll say under reasonable suspicion circumstances when somebody is suspected of being impaired by marijuana on the job. But it's a very, very narrow exception. So I'm not saying that broadly you can test for marijuana in New York. But even in New York, which perhaps has the strict the strictest law when it comes to testing for marijuana, um there are some exceptions uh in circumstances where you can test for marijuana. So the answer to the question is yes, you can test for marijuana in all 50 states, but you have to be very careful in a handful of states to make sure that you understand the law and you're complying with those laws.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And I think what's also important to just briefly touch on, Bill, is in a lot of states, yeah, you can test for marijuana. But what you do with that positive result is where you can get in trouble.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And that's where employers are going to get, you know, in trouble in the future, because there are only a handful of states that have these very restrictive laws when it comes to what you do with the positive result. But if we were going to be talking about, say, sort of the future of our industry, I would predict that we're gonna see more and more laws like California and Washington and Nevada, for example, where the law stri strictly prohibits employers from refusing to hire a medical marijuana user based solely on a positive test for marijuana. As long as they're a registered medical marijuana user. I think we'll see more and more states either amend their existing marijuana laws to include those kinds of restrictions or new marijuana laws that already, from the very get-go, include those kind of restrictions.
SPEAKER_00:Great information. And it's really important that the companies have a policy that align with the state laws, what they can do and what they can't do. Can they terminate? Can they do they have to offer a second chance? Uh, can they not terminate based on solely the use of the marijuana? I want to close the marijuana discussion with uh I want to bring up a topic that uh labors on me all the time these days. Um and you you referenced it a little bit earlier when you talked about some accidents. In the 80s, that got Congress's attention. So Congress passed the Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act of 1991, which, as you said, codified the DOT required drug testing and and added alcohol testing. And this was partially based on a New York City subway crash as well as a 1987 train collision in Chase, Maryland, where the Conrail crew involved in the collision were found to have been smoking marijuana positive for marijuana. What perplexes me, Bill, is that now our elected officials are looking to legalize marijuana on a federal level. I'm often confused. I mean, we started out with passing these laws because of marijuana-related accidents. So I'm confused. Can you give me your perspective on this?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'm going to give you my perspective, and we may need to do edit this out later. But my perspective is how can you be the president who wants to reduce crime in our country and at the same time legalize marijuana, which has been documented in uh un you know, innumerable studies and reports leads to more crime and more violence. I mean, that doesn't make any sense that on the one hand we're going to send the National Guard in to reduce crime in a city, which maybe is good or bad. I don't I'm not trying to make a political statement, but at the same time make it easier for people to smoke marijuana or use marijuana, which leads to more crime. And so I and that started with the Biden administration, and now you know there's a lot of rumors that President Trump is is on the verge of doing something like that. But what our audience needs to know is that marijuana right now, as you know, Joe, is a Schedule I controlled substance, meaning that there's no legitimate medical use for it and it's subject to abuse and addiction. So if you look at marijuana and you ask yourself, is it subject to abuse and addiction? And is there any legitimate known medical use for the drug? The answer at this time is is no. There's no known uh you know medical use and it is subject to abuse. We there's all kinds of and I've got a lot of those statistics in my new book. So it's still, by definition, a classic uh Schedule I drug. If you move it to Schedule III, then it's no longer subject to the same restrictions that apply to a Schedule I drug. In other words, doctors can start to prescribe it instead of simply recommend it. And uh banks can deal in cannabis transactions legally, which they're restricted from doing at this time in in in many cases. But it also, unless there's some language included in the movement from Schedule I to Schedule III, it would no longer authorize government certified laboratories, SAMSA certified laboratories, it would no longer give the government the authority to certify laboratories to test for marijuana. And so suddenly marijuana, the number one drug of abuse, the number one drug that's involved in traffic fatalities, etc., DOT would no longer be able to require covered employers to test for marijuana. It just doesn't make sense to me. So you know, we don't know what the future holds or how soon something like that might happen. I address that in my new book, but I just think that that just defies logic to legalize marijuana at the federal level.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I agree. And I also, you know, think about the the folks that are in Congress that are thinking about making this move and and actively a lot of them saying, Oh, marijuana should be legal, they forgot why we started drug testing to begin with, because of accidents that were occurring where people were using marijuana and people died and people got hurt.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, since the advent, the real strong push for the legalization of what we sometimes hear called adult use marijuana or recreational marijuana use, since that really came into focus on the legalization side, we have seen an uptick in traffic fatalities in states that have legalized marijuana, especially Colorado. Colorado's a b a perfect prime example of that. We've also seen a dramatic increase in post-accident positivity for marijuana in the workplace. So we've seen an increase in what we can we can logically conclude is an increase in marijuana-related accidents of the workplace because the positivity rates have been going up. In fact, it was just a couple of years when Quest Diagnostics put out its annual report and indicated that marijuana post-accident positivity had reached a 25-year high. So, no pun intended, but we we don't want to be high. We want to be low when it comes to workplace accidents. Marijuana is increasing the unsafe um, you know, sort of the unsafety factor in the workplace. And I don't think it makes sense to make it even more accessible. And another thing I'll add to that, there was a study that came out, it was a survey of marijuana users, 500 marijuana users who were employed. This came out about three years ago, I'd say. And among the questions that were asked was do you use marijuana on your way to work in the morning? And it was 32 percent. I'm gonna get those numbers wrong, so but I'll get you the right numbers. But it was in the low 30s, but it was 30 something percent that said that um they admitted to using marijuana on their way to work. So there was a study that came out from the University of Sydney that analyzed 80 different studies from around the world to try to determine the window of impairment from marijuana use. And they concluded that it was somewhere between three and ten hours, that somebody would still be under the influence and possibly impaired after using marijuana. Well, if you used marijuana during the hour that you were driving to work, and let's say you smoked a couple of joints in the marijuana today, the THC potency level of marijuana today is an average of 17%, you know, and it could be much higher if you're using edibles and gummies and things like that, especially in states like Colorado. But if you smoked a couple of joints on your way to work and then you show up to work and somebody hands you the keys to a forklift or a delivery van, it's very likely you're still under the influence of marijuana for two or three or four hours during your work shift. Now, that to me is not necessarily a question of whether or not marijuana should be legal. It's a question of safety in the workplace and safety in society. If that marijuana-impaired delivery driver uh runs a red light and hurts someone or heaven forbid kills someone, that liability is going to fall on the shoulders of the employer who should have known and who should have presented, prevented it by testing those individuals for marijuana.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a big topic. Uh if there's any movement and it does get uh rescheduled, we'll we'll definitely circle back and talk about that some more. Um you can also go back to our, I think it was episode number two actually with um Phil Dubois. We talked for an hour on this whole marijuana issue. But I want to get uh back, Bill, to um your current job, okay, your current job uh with current consulting group. And um just briefly um some history and background about the evolution of you got started in 1998 and um it was WFC uh consultants, I believe. WFC and Associates. WFC and Associates, and now your current consulting group. So just real briefly, what happened between 1998 and 2025?
SPEAKER_02:Well, we started out with just me, and I was trying to solicit drug testing policy development services. And I would get a client and I would write their policy for them. I had a database of state laws that I didn't make available to the public at that point, and I used that information to help me write legally compliant policies depending on the state or states that a client was in. And then eventually we added uh I I would get asked by companies to advise them on their marketing campaigns and their brand promotion. And so slowly but surely we sort of added that to our repertoire of services. We started a webinar hosting business. Uh more recently in the last couple of years, we started a podcast, very popular for people to do that. We have newsletters that we put out, we do social media management, et cetera. But our core business is still what we call compliance consulting. That's writing and reviewing policies, whether they're DOT or non-DOT. We have a full suite of online training courses, supervisor training, uh, non-DOT, as well as by each DOT mode. We do in-person training as well, but everything to support the drug test process. So we don't knew we don't do what national drug screening does. We're not a TPA, we don't do collections, we don't have MROs, et cetera. But hopefully, Joe, if you had a client that needed a 50-state policy, we might be able to help with that. So we provide our services, usually not directly to the employer, but through other drug testing providers who don't really specialize in policy development or training. That's where we come in and provide our services.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So it sounds like you have a lot of employers that are your clients, and then also people that are in the drug testing business like consortium slash third-party administrators.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. That's a big part of our business.
SPEAKER_00:So you got employers, TPAs, any other types of businesses?
SPEAKER_02:Well, we we um have kind of a specialty in uh the insurance industry. Okay. We have uh eight major insurance providers that have designated as designated current consulting group as their preferred provider for drug-free workplace services. Now, again, we don't do the drug testing, so if one of their customers needs drug testing, we would refer them to national drug screening or another company that can handle that part of it. But we'll write the policies, we'll do the training, we'll provide the state law expertise. If it's a DOT policy, as you mentioned, we have this new division of our company called uh the DOT Legends, as well as Patrice Kelly Global Solutions for the international consulting work, and that's all intended to help companies comply with the federal regulations, whether it's drug testing or other safety issues related to transportation.
SPEAKER_00:So um that's a great lead into my next question, is kind of the the newest and most exciting thing going on at current consulting group is the DOT legends. So who are these legends and what's that all about?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it started back when the current administration started cutting back through Doge, and they were eliminating a lot of federal government positions. And so it hit every I think it hit every federal agency, including the Department of Transportation. And so some really smart, very experienced experts in the world of DOT drug testing started taking the buyout or or leaving on their own. And uh the first person I approached was Patrice Kelly, who was the longest serving um director of Odapsy, you know, which is the agency within DOT that oversees drug testing in federal motor carrier or aviation, et cetera. And so then Patrice and I started uh Patrice Kelly Global Solutions, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the current consulting group. And then we started adding more DOT people. So we have Juan Moya, who was in the past with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, as well as the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration. He wrote the clearinghouse regulations. So a lot of companies struggle with those clearinghouse uh requirements. Juan wrote those regulations, and so he works for Current Consulting Group. We also have Sam Noe from Federal Railroad, and on October 1st, we'll be announcing that Virginia Lazata from FAA has joined the Current Consulting Group. And so they're the DOT legends. If you call DOT right now with a question, as you were used to doing in the past, you'll get a recording that suggests that you send in an email. And instead of talking to someone, you're going to be encouraged to send in an email, and then they'll vet those questions and somebody down the road will answer it, and hopefully within a couple of weeks you'll get some kind of answer to your question. Or you can use current consulting group and the DOT legends and get an answer to your question today.
SPEAKER_00:That's awesome. So as a as a drug testing TPA, I'm dealing with hundreds of employers all the time, and I might get a complex question, and so maybe I uh enter into a retainer agreement where I've got you and your DOT legends on a retainer, and I can call and ask a question, or I can connect them to my employer client and they can provide them assistance, maybe a mock FAA audit or something of that nature.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so we have monthly retainers for larger companies or companies that are going to use it all the time. But we also have what we call renewable retainer agreements where you purchase five or so hours at a time and you use it as you need it, but you don't stand in line to get an answer to your question because you've already paid for the time. And then when you get to about 80 percent of your time being used, we'll send you a notice and invite you to renew it and you decide at that point if you want to or not. But that gives you priority access to the DOT legends.
SPEAKER_00:So, you know, if I was sitting around having a couple of beers with a couple of my entrepreneurial friends, we would say, man, that was quite a coup, Bill. And uh who came up with that outstanding marketing slogan, the DOT legends?
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Powell Well, I'm gonna give Patrice Kelly credit for that. Um one day on the phone we were sort of noodling around with different things, and I think she came up with it, and then our marketing team came up with the logo, which we're gonna be um uh releasing at the SAPA conference here in a couple of weeks that you and I will be at in uh Phoenix, Arizona. So but I'm gonna give Patrice credit credit for that.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome, awesome. So let's um kind of wrap up with a few things here. Um a lot's occurred over the past 30 plus years with both of us being in the drug testing industry. Um can you just briefly summarize, maybe exclude marijuana because we've taken we've we've touched on that, but some of the major changes we've seen over 30 years?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I think the biggest change um is the advent of oral fluid testing. It was nothing but lab-based urine testing for three decades uh through the federal government. And so if you were covered by DOT, for example, the only testing method that you could use was lab-based urine testing. And uh just a couple of years ago in 2023, they came out with final a final rule for lab-based oral fluid testing. Now, as I mentioned before, we're still waiting for a couple of laboratories to be certified. But that was a major development in our industry for the federal government to endorse another drug testing method. And the reason I say that is because even outside of the DOT regulations, if you're not even if you're not covered by the DOT regulations, you've likely put a program together with your TPA that sort of mirrors the components of a DOT program. You're using uh certified collectors, um, you're using a certified laboratory if you're doing lab-based testing, you're using a medical review officer, you're using a maybe a substance abuse professional when you're giving somebody a second chance agreement, things of that nature. And there are a number of states that in their state drug testing laws, they simply punted on all of these issues years ago and simply deferred to the federal regulations. They may call it Part 40 or DOT or SAMHSA. Some of the older laws even refer to it as the NIDA regulations. We don't use that terminology anymore. But even in those states now, if you read those laws carefully, they didn't really go into a lot of detail. They just simply deferred to the federal regulations. And now that Part 40 includes oral fluid, lab-based oral fluid testing, then I think you're, you know, you're going to see a lot more employers, even outside of the DOT regulations, being more open-minded to an alternative testing method, in this case, oral fluid testing. And so I think that's the biggest change because I think oral fluid testing aligns very well with some of the trends that we're seeing, like the legalization of marijuana, because you get that shorter window of detection with the oral fluid versus urine and hair. And that may be really what employers are looking for, not like a lifestyle look at drug testing or drug abuse, but maybe just sort of immediate recent use.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I find when talking to employers, and there's always the big questions about what do I do when there's an accident? When I what do I do when there's reasonable suspicion? We can't get them to a collection site to get urine collected. And I always say, well, have you thought about oral fluid? And have you thought about training somebody on your team to collect oral fluid, either going to the lab or doing an instant for the post-accident test or the reasonable suspicion test? Because you're really trying to find out if they've recently used drugs. That's what you're trying to find out. And urine test doesn't really give you that answer. Oral fluid does.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, with oral fluid testing, because you're detecting the parent drug, parent THC, marijuana becomes detectable in an oral fluid sample within minutes after usage. But the window of detecting is going to be much, much shorter for with oral fluid than with urine. So if it's a post-accident situation, for example, and you can do a rapid oral fluid test, which is a great solution in that situation, you're going to know whether the person used marijuana very recently. And that may be part of how you react to the accident because you've got a drug test result that shows very recent drug use.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, awesome information about oral fluid drug testing. Now, Bill, you didn't hold back at all when we talked about legalization of marijuana and your thoughts about that. So one of my last questions here is what are your thoughts about some of these larger corporations who have abandoned drug testing altogether? They're not they used to drug tests and now they're not doing it at all.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you know, I don't want to comment on any specific company, of course, uh, but I think it's short-sighted. I think we'll see some of them come back to drug testing generally and testing for marijuana specifically. There's an area of law, and I'm not an attorney, so I'm not trying to give legal advice, but there's an area of law called Respondit Superior, which holds employers responsible for the acts and behavior of their employees when they're functioning within the scope of employment. And so, like that delivery van driver uh example I used earlier. Let's say that guy is under the influence of marijuana, he causes an accident, hurts somebody, something bad happens, the employer under Responsibility Superior Law will be held or could be held responsible for that individual's actions. And if you're a small company and it's a say an$800,000 judgment against you, that could put you out of business. But if you can show that you made a good faith effort to prevent drug abusers from being on your payroll and certainly from performing safety-sensitive jobs, you strengthen your position to, you know, sort of object to that legal claim against you. If you're a big company, you know, with much, much deeper pockets, uh, and somebody is hurt or killed in an accident caused by one of your marijuana impaired employees, you're gonna be held responsible for that financially at a much higher level. And I think we're gonna see more of that. We know that post-accident positivity for marijuana is going, you know, through those through the roof, so to speak. And so I think we'll see a lot of those companies come back to testing and come back to testing for marijuana. They're just gonna have to because the it's just too risky not to.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's kind of like folks that, you know, they buy insurance so their house doesn't burn down or their business don't burn down, but then they're like, oh, we haven't had a fire, so we dropped the insurance. Okay. So, Bill, last question for today before we kind of wrap things up is um what are kind of your predictions about where the drug testing industry as a business is heading?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I look at that issue very carefully every year. We conduct two surveys every year. They're very popular. Uh you've participated probably in all of them, Joe, over the years. There's uh we just did our 27th annual drug testing industry survey. We released the results of that at the Endesa conference back in April in Jacksonville. And in a couple of weeks, we're gonna release the results of our annual employer survey at the SAPA conference in Phoenix, Arizona. And to answer that question, I will just say right now that right now, even though companies have been very, you know, sort of uh loosey-goosey when it comes to whether they're gonna continue testing or testing for marijuana, right now I would say that drug testing is safe. It's uh it's a practice that employers value. The number one reason why employers drug test, according to our surveys, is safety. And I think that as legal marijuana laws continue to spread and encroach on employers' rights, we're gonna see more marijuana impairment in the workplace. And the book that I wrote, What Every Employer Should Know About Marijuana, is not necessarily a book about legalization of marijuana and what I think about that. That wasn't the purpose of the book. The purpose of the book was to talk about the value of drug testing to protect the safety and the well-being of employees in the workplace and the customers and society that we serve. I don't think that issue goes away. And when we stop drug testing, I think it becomes even more challenging for the employer. But I do think that how we test and the ways that we test will continue to change. I think we'll see more uh fitness for duty testing, more impairment testing that's not necessarily a drug test. I think we'll see more oral fluid testing with its shorter, tighter window of detection. And I think we'll see a lot more awk health services, especially digital ties digitalized. Am I saying that right? Digitized, let's see. Um health services, and making the drug test easier to do, faster to do, get results quicker. I think that all these things that are sort of putting pressure on corporations like the economy, the legalization of marijuana, things of that issue will make the the in the markets for drug testing, like employers, demand faster, more efficient, and effective uh ways to do the drug test. I see, I think in the next five years we'll see some pretty dramatic changes in our industry.
SPEAKER_00:Well, we both look forward to those dramatic changes. Hopefully we can handle them well. And uh I want to thank you again, Bill, for being here. Jesse, you want to talk a little bit about our sponsor, which is Bill's company?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, once again, thank you so much to our sponsor, the current consulting group, also known as CCG. Uh CCG offers expert drug testing industry consultants with compliance and marketing support. CCG provides policy, state drug testing laws, and training in person as well as online. Custom consulting projects are also available, including mock audits for DOT compliance and expert witness testimony. So, yeah, give a call to uh the current consulting group for all of those needs.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome. And again, thanks to the current consulting group for being today's sponsor. Thanks to our audience for viewing and listening. I know I'm supposed to say something like uh if if you enjoy the podcast, if you like the content, if you like me, if you like Bill, uh like it online or in the in all podcast uh stations, subscribe, ring the bell, tell your friends and colleagues about this great podcast, Joe Riley on drug testing in America. Thanks, Bill Current. Thanks so much for being our guest and being a part of my career in drug testing for so many years. Um any final thoughts you may want to share with our audience?
SPEAKER_02:Joe, thank you very much. And uh as much as I may have been a mentor to you, you've been a mentor to me. So thank you for having me for having me on the podcast today.
SPEAKER_00:Well, co-mentorship, right? And thanks, Jesse. Uh, did you learn anything today?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I appreciate that. Um well I did learn that you guys have a lot of history, which is really cool because you guys have uh kind of grown up in this uh ever-changing marketplace. And uh it looks like you guys are definitely defining you know what this industry has done with all the books and the lectures and everything else you guys are part of, sitting on many different boards of advisories and and all these other uh uh you know kind of uh higher end, you know, the DOT legends and all these other things that you guys uh are part of. Seems like an exclusive group that you guys are part of. So yeah, I'm learning I'm I'm sitting by a couple legends myself today.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, great. And don't forget that um in two weeks our next episode is gonna be on Inside the FMCSA Clearinghouse. It's a five-year-old program. It's a database of drivers who have tested positive CDL drivers driving large trucks on our roads. Um I don't know how many there are right now, but I know last year at this time there were about 175,000 drivers on a prohibited list in the clearinghouse, which means they had a violation. That's pretty scary. We're gonna spend an hour on that uh in two weeks on our podcast inside the FMCSA Clearinghouse. So thanks again. Thanks, Bill. Jesse, you want to close us out?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, once again, thank you so much for tuning in to Joe Riley on drug testing in America today. Uh be sure to click that uh subscribe button, uh, ring the bell, uh absolutely leave a comment or questions. Joe loves to get back to those comments and he'll answer those as thoroughly as possible. And also check out our TikTok. Go over there, give us a follow, uh, Facebook uh as well. We have a page where you can see some other content being uh published as well. So all kinds of places for you to find out more about national drug screening, Joe Riley and Associates, and everything else drug screening in America. Thank you so much until next time.