DOI: 10.36347/sajp

Pages: 42-47

The objective is to study the prevalence of drug abuse among a sample of security guards through workplace drug testing, using a pre-employment urine drug test. A cross-sectional study was carried out on 122 security guards during their pre-employment examinations in a private health care hospital in SA during the period March to December; 2013.All participants provided urine samples which were screened for drugs. All positive screening tests were confirmed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. 10.7 % of the participants had positive tests, of which 69.2% were positive for THC and the remaining were positive for amphetamine. All security guards with positive urine drug test results were males and current smokers compared to those with negative urine drug test results (84.4%, 48.6%) (P < 0.05). This study shows a high prevalence of drug urine test positive results among security guards which should be further studied using a case-control study design and a large sample size. Health education and employee assistant programs are recommended to prevent and control drug abuse among security guards.