Urinalysis, urine cup with reagent strip pH paper test and comparison chart in laboratory
Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
An Arizona lawmaker says legislators shouldn’t make laws while on drugs for the same reason they shouldn’t drive while under the influence.
If they do they’ll make bad decisions, says the lawmaker, Rep. Julie Willoughby.
So she has introduced a proposal to require all members of the Legislature to submit to random drug testing at the discretion of the Senate president or the House speaker. That would apply any time lawmakers are in session.
“A drug has the power of inhibiting your reasoning ability, to make you paranoid, to make you see things that aren’t there, to make you hallucinate,” Willoughby, a first-term Republican representative from Chandler, told Capitol Media Services. “And that could be severe when you’re talking about the job that we do as far as legislating new laws and defending different things.”
Yet Willoughby’s measure would not allow lawmakers to be tested for their blood-alcohol content to see if they’ve perhaps had one too many drinks at lunch before they come to the floor to vote. That exemption, she said, is justified by the technology involved.
“To test alcohol without a breathalyzer you need a blood draw which would require a lot more work to obtain the sample than a urine blood screen,” Willoughby said.
Anyway, she said, the key is testing for non-prescription drugs in a lawmaker’s system.
