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Virtues

Versions of this article were published by Ken Shigley as a president’s column in the Georgia Bar Journal (August 2011) and as the chairman’s column in the American Association for Justice Motor Vehicle Collision, Highway & Premises Liability Section Newsletter (Spring 2016).

James[1] had great unrealized potential. Son of a minister in another Southern state, he won admission to an Ivy League university but washed out during his first year and went home to complete college and law school. A marvelous story teller, his closing arguments could hold juries spellbound. But his cleverness was so unrestrained by mere…

Undercover investigators for the Government Accountint Office have found that it is surprisingly easy to cheat on random drug tests designed to catch truck drivers who use drugs.  Using bogus truck driver’s licenses to gain access to 24 drug-testing sites, the investigators  found that 75 percent “failed to restrict access to  items that could be used to adulterate or dilute the [urine] specimen, meaning that running water, soap, or air freshener was available in the bathroom during the test.”
While the FMCSA estimates that fewer than 2 percent of truck drivers test positive each year for controlled substances,  when Oregon conducted its own tests, 9 percent of truck drivers tested positive.
Dozens of products on the Web are marketed to truckers as fail-safe ways to defeat the mandatory drug tests. The GAO team  bought drug-masking products over the Web and was able to mix them with real specimens at the drug-testing sites “without being caught by site collectors,” the agency said in a report scheduled to be made public Thursday.
(Thanks to alert reader David Warren in Florida for calling my attention to this article.)