Baltimore - uniform drug testing

In the 2 1/2 years since Baltimore County began requiring career firefighters to take random drug tests, at least a half-dozen have been dismissed for substance abuse. But the county's estimated 2,000 volunteer firefighters and paramedics are not required to take the tests.

The association's members voted last week on a plan to pay for tests of new volunteers starting Sept. 1, she said. And the association is looking at the prospect of random drug testing for all volunteers, she said.

Volunteer companies have been discussing a policy that would require random drug tests for volunteers, but one question has been who will pay for the testing, which officials estimate would cost $30,000 a year countywide.

"It's easy for career service to do this because they know exactly when these people are going to be available according to the duty schedule," Doran said. Volunteers, however, often come and go at the firehouse, and it might be difficult for them to take time off their full-time jobs to take the tests, he said.

Day, the local fire union president, pointed to the policy in Anne Arundel County, where, a spokesman there said, volunteers receive notices when they go to the station that they need to be tested by a certain time. The county uses a contractor that administers the tests at night, the spokesman said.

Richard Duffy, assistant to the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said the association opposes random drug testing on grounds that it violates privacy rights. But he said the association essentially supports an all-or-none policy, adding that it did not make sense to require random testing of career firefighters but not volunteers.

"If it is truly going to be random, then it has to be random from the top to the bottom," Duffy said, adding, "How could you exclude anybody?"