June 20, 2011: The U.S. Air Force recently fired (discharged) 30 junior personnel for using or selling synthetic drugs, in this case a marijuana-like item called "Spice." All the airmen were based at Tinker Air Force Base. This is part of a trend. Earlier this year, the U.S. Navy recently expelled 16 sailors for using Spice. These sailors were assigned to an amphibious carrier (USS Bataan). Currently, 30-40 sailors a month are caught using synthetic drugs. Recently, this included seven midshipmen at the Naval Academy, who were expelled.

Getting high has consequences. For the last two years, the U.S. Department of Defense has been cracking down on troops using recreational drugs that are not yet illegal. Spice, for a long time, was not illegal, but now it is. There is also a crackdown on the use of drugs that mask use of illegal drugs. Because of both these trends, the random urine tests no longer work as well as they used to.

Over the last few years, an increasing number of test defeating products have appeared on the market. The navy, and the other services, have responded by prohibiting troops from possessing any of these test defeating products. If this doesn't reduce the cheating sufficiently, the military may have to go to hair tests. Drug traces remain in hair for about 90 days, but it is more time consuming and expensive to test hair. There are also products (like special shampoos) that will reduce the effectiveness of the hair test. But the current products used to mask the urine tests are not a hundred percent effective, so people are still getting caught, and the military is making more of an effort to identify and punish dealers and distributors of these drugs, especially in ship crews and those who maintain complex equipment (like aircraft). This is what happened recently in the air force.

All this moved into high gear several years ago when the military realized that anyone caught using any substance that causes intoxication, had to be expelled or punished. These transgressions can range from sniffing glue (a legal substance) to the many organic substances and designer drugs on the market, that are not yet illegal (like Spice used to be), and may never be. The fear is that widespread use of these substances could lead to death or injury. Troops frequently handle dangerous equipment, or are responsible for maintaining weapons and vehicles (like helicopters or jets) which are very vulnerable to errors by the maintainers. Most equipment failures can be traced to human error.

But sometimes troops are allowed to use drugs to fight fatigue. For over a century, the solution has been amphetamines ("speed"). However, this drug can impair judgment, making the user more aggressive, for example. In the last decade, kinder and gentler medications have become available. With some of these, tests showed that user performance was degraded 15-30 percent, versus 60-100 percent for those who took nothing at all after 24 hours of being awake. While these new drugs did a pretty good job, the current dextroamphetamine was still a bit better. So amphetamines remain competitive.

Wakefulness can be a potent weapon, especially for commandos, or troops engaged in prolonged combat (like the Battle of Fallujah in 2004). Without these wakefulness drugs, you would have to either pull troops out of action so they could rest, or leave them in and risk having them make fatal mistakes. Either way, you have a problem, because there are never enough troops to get the job done. But with the wakefulness medications, you can solve the problem, for a few days, anyway. Prolonged use of these drugs is not healthy. But neither is being drowsy during combat. Such wakefulness drugs are generally not as useful for support troops, especially equipment operators and maintainers.

Islamic terrorists and the Taliban are, in theory, anti-drug, but they tolerate the use of narcotics among their fighters, as this often makes it possible for young, untrained gunmen to make audacious attacks. Drug tests on the bodies often reveals the presence of mood enhancing drugs, often large doses of methamphetamine (enough to make you fearless, not just more alert.)