Egypt MPs and lawyers push to scrap drug‑test firing law

Amira lost her job at a state-owned company in Alexandria after a drug test she was told she had passed. The 2021 law under which she was dismissed requires Egyptian public and private sector employees to test negative for drugs to be hired, promoted, or simply keep their positions.

When Amira underwent the test as part of a routine promotion process, she disclosed that she was taking medication for irritable bowel syndrome and an immune condition, and handed over her prescriptions for review. “Nobody paid attention,” she said.

She was informed her test result had proved negative. Yet, two months later, she was fired anyway. She has since filed a police report; the case was referred to forensic authorities and remains under investigation by prosecutors in Alexandria’s Mahram Bek district.

Her case, recounted at a roundtable in Cairo on Tuesday organized by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) and the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), is one of thousands that campaigners say expose the human cost of Law 73 of 2021. Critics argue that the legislation was rushed through parliament, is constitutionally flawed, and has ruined livelihoods with little recourse for those wrongly caught up in it.

Mahmoud Hamed, a former employee at the state firm Nile Company for Pharmaceuticals, described a similar ordeal: he was dismissed after testing positive for tramadol, despite medical documentation — including official health ministry reports — showing he had torn cartilage in his left knee and was taking the painkiller under medical guidance. His request for a retest was denied, he said, and he was not granted the 24-hour window the law allows for a second sample before his dismissal was finalized solely on the basis of the initial result.

A law born of a moral panic, critics say

The law violates individuals’ basic right to work, argued Ishaq Ibrahim, who heads the EIPR’s equality and non-discrimination unit. A dismissal on drug-test grounds follows an employee into future job searches, he told the roundtable, since it must be documented as the cause of termination — and offers no adequate mechanism to appeal before that termination takes effect. Its design, in his view, may actively deter drug users from seeking treatment voluntarily, since doing so risks their livelihood rather than earning them support.

Objections to the law are not new, Ibrahim added: it faced pushback as early as 2019, when it was first proposed, including from Egypt’s Central Agency for Organization and Administration, which had called for safeguards against arbitrary dismissal before the bill passed in 2021.

The several of the legislation’s articles “suffer from constitutional flaws,” according to Rahma Rifaat, a legal adviser at the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services who is drafting proposed amendments. The law emerged in the aftermath of traffic accidents linked to drug use, she said, but its implementation has produced what she called “social tragedies” among workers.

“The law needs a fundamental review, because some of its provisions conflict with constitutional and legal principles — including holding employees accountable for conduct unrelated to their job performance,” she said, arguing that workers should be judged on workplace conduct, not on matters outside the scope of their employment.

Blanket mandatory drug testing for promotion or continued employment should be scrapped altogether, in Rifaat’s view; testing, she argued, should be limited to cases where an employee’s behavior visibly affects their work, or applied through periodic screening administered equally to all staff without exception. Any legislative amendment, she proposed, should retroactively annul all dismissals issued under the law since it took effect, pending review of each case, and establish a joint committee — drawing on relevant state bodies — to receive complaints from affected workers and examine wrongful applications of the law.

Parliament divided

The law was passed amid a climate shaped by a spate of public incidents linked — without being explicitly named — to drug use, said Atef Maghawry, head of the Tagammu Party’s parliamentary bloc, framing he argued allowed the bill through with little scrutiny of its consequences. He had previously submitted a bill to amend the law, he said, but it was never brought to debate, and accused parliament of ceding part of its legislative role to the government. There was, however, what he called a “positive sign”: the Fund for Drug Control and Treatment has said it is willing to discuss amending the law, which he hoped would open the door to a broader legislative review.

The response to drug use among employees should centre on the right to treatment and to a defence, not automatic dismissal, according to Ahmed Bilal, another MP who has proposed amendments. The law’s enforcement, he said, has stigmatized thousands of families at a time when the state says it is committed to combating discrimination and bullying. The law, he argued, is designed primarily to fire people, treating employees as inherently suspect by subjecting them to surprise testing without adequate protections.

Even the Fund for Drug Control and Treatment lacks reliable data on how many employees have been dismissed under the law, Bilal said, despite being one of the bodies responsible for its implementation — this even as it received roughly 1,600 appeals at one point, and upheld most of them. “That’s an indicator that there are problems with how this is being applied,” he said.

Drug-test results are not infallible, Ihab Mansour, an MP with the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, told the roundtable; like any medical test, they carry a margin of error. He asked whether any method exists that can determine drug use or addiction with 100% certainty, and called for state bodies, parliament and civil society to jointly review how the law is being enforced.

Medical experts: false positives are common

Certain medications, including drugs for irritable bowel syndrome, immune conditions, and some antibiotics, as well as certain foods, can produce false positives in drug screening, said Dr Ihab El-Kharrat, a psychiatric consultant who prepared the medical report submitted in a court case seeking to suspend the law. Testing typically begins with a rapid initial screen, he explained, followed by a confirmatory laboratory analysis; a full clinical assessment, not the test result alone, should inform decisions that affect someone’s livelihood.

Employees who test positive should be referred to treatment rather than dismissed outright, in El-Kharrat’s assessment, though Egypt’s addiction treatment system, he noted, is constrained by limited capacity, with only around 10,000 beds nationwide dedicated to addiction treatment. Easing licensing requirements for addiction treatment centres would expand that capacity, he argued; as it stands, the shortage of treatment spaces makes referring users into programmes difficult in many cases.