Arizona lawmaker wants random drug testing of her colleagues

PHOENIX — 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.’’

Consider drunken driving, she said. “You see someone no longer being able to have the correct response time to things,’’ Willoughby said.

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.

That wouldn’t account for marijuana, which, due to a 2020 public vote, essentially has the same legal status in Arizona as alcohol. While there are limits in the amount any person can possess at one time, there is nothing illegal about the use of the drug, whether for someone who is self-medicating for a condition or using it for recreational purposes.

But Willoughby said she thinks marijuana also should be something looked for in random drug tests.

“Though it’s a legal drug, it’s not legal to use all the time,’’ she said, citing a situation, for example, in which someone is working as a health-care professional. “That would kind of be the same umbrella in my thought process for this drug.’’

That presents a host of different challenges. The test for marijuana involves looking for metabolites, chemicals left behind as the drug breaks down in the body. They can remain long after the effects of the psychoactive elements are gone.

And the Arizona Supreme Court has ruled, in drunken driving cases, that the mere presence of metabolites is insufficient to sustain a conviction. Instead, a prosecutor must show a driver actually was impaired.

Willoughby said she doesn’t see that as a problem.

“The bill is more allowing for the ability to do drug testing,’’ she said. “It’s not calling for what would happen after there’s a positive drug screen.’’

Instead, the results would be referred to the legislative Ethics Committee, which would determine if the lawmaker was doing something inappropriate.

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Willoughby said the same logic would apply to someone who tested positive for a drug for which they have a prescription, whether or not it was the kind that could impair someone’s judgment. The Ethics Committee would decide.

Results of the drug tests would become public only after the Ethics Committee reviewed them and after its members voted to require the lawmaker to respond. That is the point when everyone would know the results, Willoughby said.

Asked about the issue of “probable cause,’’ of having a reason to test someone, she responded, “That’s a fair question.”

In fact, she acknowledged, allowing the Senate president or the House speaker to decide who to test means it could be “weaponized against somebody you don’t like.’’

But Willoughby said she is relying on the discretion of those leaders to use the power only when they see someone acting “abnormally,’’ perhaps even in an “uninhibited’’ manner.

That question of what sort of unusual behavior might trigger a demand for a drug test bemused Sen. John Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican who has been in the Legislature since 2007.

“Many of our legislators are capable of coming up with weird bills without the use of drugs,’’ he said. Nor does Kavanagh believe drug testing is necessary, particularly as the legislation exempts alcohol.

“I can’t remember of all my time there of any lawmaker that was even suspected of doing drugs,’’ he said.

“There might have been a few isolated instances of alcohol intoxication on the night the budget was done,’’ Kavanagh continued. “But there is no history of any kind of abuse like that.’’

That’s also the assessment of former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, whose legislative history goes back to 1997. He said he had not in that time seen people who appeared to be on drugs.

“But I knew some were absolutely under the influence of alcohol,’’ he said.

Even if there was a lawmaker who was drug impaired, Bowers dismissed the possibility he or she could do real harm to the democratic and deliberative process. It takes 31 votes to get a measure approved by the House.

“I don’t think, unless they got 30 plus one all toking at once, that it would have some wave of influence,’’ he quipped.

How far legislative leadership is prepared to let Willoughby go with the measure remains unclear.

House Speaker Ben Toma, a Peoria Republican who would gain the power to demand random drug tests under her bill, has yet to assign it to a committee for a hearing.

Willoughby acknowledged her bill may not be quite ready for prime time. But she said that in introducing and pursuing it, she is keeping her commitment to constituents who first raised the issue about drug-impaired lawmakers with her, prompting her to craft the legislation.