Big John

Who can doubt Ronald Reagan's sincerity when he calls for a drug-free America? After all, the President produced a sample of his urine for analysis last year and asked his Cabinet and White House staff to do the same. When he ordered 1 million federal workers in "sensitive" jobs to submit to drug testing, however, he did not explain how it would be administered. The answer came last week, but the complex guidelines seem to create a combination of Big Brother and high school bathroom monitors -- a sort of Big John.

Outlined in a 29-page manual, the drug-detection program calls for specially appointed personnel to administer the tests in designated rest rooms. After presenting a photo ID, workers will be asked to remove their coats, and their briefcases and purses will be taken from them before they enter the stalls. Water in the toilets must be dyed blue, lest employees substitute H2O for their urine. The temperature of the specimens will be tested within four minutes, to make sure that workers are proffering fresh urine rather than "clean" samples they might have purchased.

Those whose samples are rejected for any reason, or whose behavior suggests they might have cheated, will be forced to provide a second specimen "under direct observation." Anyone whose urine shows drug traces will be required to return to the bathroom. If the subsequent exam brings positive results, the guilty will be required to undergo counseling. Workers who refuse as a matter ! of principle to submit to testing can be dismissed.

The guidelines are effective immediately, but agencies will be given 180 days to determine which jobs are sensitive enough to require testing. Attorney General Edwin Meese, who unveiled the program with Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen, insisted the procedures were designed to prevent the dismissal of innocent employees. But federal employees' unions denounced the plan as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." Robert Tobias, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, complains that the guidelines imply federal workers are "potential cheats." Says Tobias, whose union has succeeded at least temporarily, in forcing the U.S. Customs Service to halt its drug- testing program: "This is a comic exercise in Ty-D-bol justice."