As a former in-house attorney for four different tribes, I’ve seen several proposals to require tribal employees to be subject to random drug testing. I’ve always been against the idea because, in my experience, it creates an adversarial employment relationship. I even wrote one of my first articles about this question, “The Drug War Against Tribal Government Employees: Adopting the Ways of the Conqueror,” published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
Part of my objection to drug testing tribal government employees is that there is no justification for testing employees — unless the government finds a serious problem of substance abuse amongst employees. And in the tribal governments I worked with, I saw nothing of the sort. If anything, the people working for tribal government were the cleanest, soberest, hardest-working people in the community. They would have to be or else they’d be replaced by someone better. My sensitivity favoring tribal employees is heightened by the fact that many tribal people not employed by the government tend to criticize (often unreasonably) tribal employees. Tribal council people know this — and to curry favor with their constituents, all too often join in the chorus. Drug testing proposals are often nothing more than political scheming. Politics does not justify intrusion into employee privacy.
Another part of my objection, not really stated in my article, is that the tribal government leaders that pushed so hard for drug testing never voted to apply it to themselves. This isn’t always the case, but it sometimes is.
I’ve not absolutist about this — if there is an established problem with employee substance abuse, then I see a justification for drug testing. I don’t like it, but since so many tribal communities are afflicted with substance abuse, if it is apparent that tribal employees are as well, then I see the argument. But like I said above, I doubt this is ever the situation.
To be fair to tribes that do drug test, there is a possibility that federal funds come with the requirement that employees be drug tested, but I think there’s a strong argument (and some authority) that those provisions are not meant to be applied to tribal governments. Moreover, I’m not aware of the government shutting down a federally-funded tribal government service because there was no drug testing of tribal employees. [Let me know if there has been.] That would be the equivalent, in my view, of the US eliminating the trust responsibility over drug testing, an outcome I doubt any federal court would agree with.
So I’m confounded a little by the news item (H/T Indianz) that the Oglala Sioux tribal council is bickering over drug testing for tribal council members. Like many tribes, OST already (apparently) subjects its employees to drug testing. And now that one of the council members has been indicted on a federal drug charge, the council is finally going to drug test its own. Several (as many as six) council members refuse to take the test.
I’ve been waiting since I wrote my article and before for a thoroughly reasoned tribal court decision tackling this subject. Maybe this could be it….
Turtle Talk 