Drugs: Sampling His Own Medicine

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The witness testifying before New York Congressman Gary Ackerman's Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee was about to take his oath when the chairman held up a small plastic jar. "A specimen is worth a thousand oaths," Ackerman told a startled Rodney Smith, deputy executive director of the President's Commission on Organized Crime. The Congressman asked Smith to go to the men's room and produce a urine sample to be tested for evidence of drug use.

Smith, supervisor of a controversial report recommending "appropriate" drug testing of federal employees, angrily denounced Ackerman's request as a "cheap shot" and refused to cooperate. Said Ackerman, who opposes mandatory drug testing as an invasion of privacy: "I thank you for very eloquently proving the point that we set out to prove."