Weed, Whites, and Wine

“If you give me weed, whites and wine
And you show me a sign
I’ll be willin’ to be movin'”

Those lyrics, from Lowell George’s song “Willin'” — recorded by Little Feat and Linda Ronstadt, among others — likely were popular among the nation’s truck drivers in the 1970s. The song made the life of the independent-minded truck driver rumbling over the back roads to avoid getting weighed seem, well, kind of cool.

The reality of truck drivers barreling down the nation’s highways loaded up on “weed, whites and wine” is disturbing, however, and the lack of an effective national program for testing commercial drivers for drug and alcohol use while on the job has some members of Congress alarmed.

The trucking industry and lawmakers acknowledge the vast majority of commercial truck drivers are not substance abusers. But with around four million individuals holding commercial drivers licenses and some 711,000 motor carriers registered by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), if even a fraction of licensed drivers are operating their vehicles while drunk or stoned the actual number could be in the hundreds of thousands.

In a Nov. 1, 2007, U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Highways and Transit hearing on the matter, Chairman Rep. Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon called findings by the General Accountability Office (GAO) that the drug testing procedures, performed by privately owned and operated facilities, are widely vulnerable to manipulation “shocking.”

“Even when this faulty system works … we don’t know how many people are out there abusing substances. The most conservative estimate, 1.7 percent, everybody agrees on that, at least 1.7 percent,” DeFazio said in his opening remarks at the hearing. “That is 170,000 truck drivers driving 80,000 pound trucks, abusing drugs. … We don’t know. There is no meaningful system, none. This is shocking. This is incredibly shocking stuff.”

He was even more appalled by the FMCSA’s response to the GAO’s findings. “They, in fact, say in their testimony, in response to GAO, no, they weren’t shocked at all to learn that these testing facilities were loophole-ridden and providing tests for which results were easily modified and made meaningless, but they have sent out posters,” DeFazio said.

Trucking industry organizations like the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) have said they are all for finding ways to identify, manage and reduce the number of drivers who abuse drugs and alcohol, but they differ in their approaches. For more on the issue, see: “Trucking under the influence” on page 56 of this edition of Insurance Journal – South Central.