Throughout history, in every society, people have used drugs, not only to cure illness and alleviate pain, but also to alter mood, thought, and feeling and to improve physical and mental performance. Furthermore, there have always been individuals and groups whose use of drugs has deviated from the medical and social conventions of the time. Societies express their disapproval of such aberrant behavior by calling it "drug abuse." Because the definition of drug abuse is culturally determined, the behaviors and drugs so labeled vary considerably from culture to culture and within the same culture from time to time. In contemporary society, such deviant behavior may range from self-experimentation or the occasional use of alcohol or marijuana to compulsive drug taking, in which individuals behave as though they cannot function optimally without certain drugs. Self-experimentation, arising from natural curiosity or a need to conform to one's peer group, is better tolerated. On the other hand, compulsive drug use is seen as harmful to both the individual and to society, and legal constraints have been established to protect both. 

Mandatory drug testing is contemporary society's response to what is currently defined as drug abuse. It is a relatively recent event that represents the convergence of two separate phenomena: the current epidemic of drug abuse and the evolution of the technology that makes it possible to detect drugs in biological specimens. To tell the history of drug testing requires, therefore, a review of both its sociocultural and technological antecedents.

The first substance acknowledged for its ability to foster dependence, and thus for its abuse potential, was alcohol. References to the "drinking habit" can be found in the Bible and in the writings of ancient physicians. Plato advised that wine be prohibited to children, slaves, and magistrates (Laws 2:674), and the New Testament warns that those who engage in drunkenness shall not inherit the Kingdom of God (Galatians 5:21).

The earliest legal constraints on alcohol date back to ancient Babylon. The Code of Hammurabi restricted wine sales, forbade priestesses from entering wine shops, and controlled prices. There are tales that in China royal astronomers were put to death for being drunk and missing an eclipse. In Persia, heavy drinkers were led through the streets by a cord strung through their noses; persistent offenders were tied with a nose cord to a stake in the public square. During the Middle Ages in China and Japan, various temperance decrees were promulgated by a succession of emperors who limited the manufacture, sale, and consumption of wine and sake. Despite such measures, alcohol use and abuse flourished in most cultures and throughout all social strata.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, following the introduction of the more potent and more disruptive distilled spirits, controls on excessive alcohol consumption were based on both religious and economic principles; however, economic controls met with public and private opposition. In Europe, religious reformers were concerned about the morality of alcohol abuse and called for moderation or total abstinence. Later, Puritan reformers in the United States inveighed against alcoholic vice. In England, Edward VI first attempted to control the acquisition of alcohol by enacting a law requiring licensure of alehouses. Subsequent measures to control retail sales of alcohol by excise taxes, licenses, and prohibitions resulted in bootlegging and violence (i.e., the "Gin Riots") and forced their repeal. While in the United States, the Whiskey Rebel lion of 1794, in which revenue officers who tried to enforce the excise law of 1791 were tarred and feathered by angry locals, demonstrated to the government the unpopularity of attempts to regulate sales of alcoholic beverages. . .