whoops that was random tests i dont know about scheduled medical exams...
Well... that was the point of my post. When there is a special apparatus for doing drug testing, with special procedures, forms, and arrangements for labs to run the testing... then you *don't* need to or want to burden the process of ordinary physicals with yet another drug test. No point in it.
The actual testing on the samples, incidentally, were not actually performed on-site in a military medical facility. Those projects were contracted out to commercial laboratories, and were done in huge volumes of samples with each contract.
Yet another reason that there would have been no point to include such a test with an ordinary physical. They bought those tests in volume with a contractor... they weren't done piecemeal on-site. It would have been a waste of time.
At any rate... I really don't think those tests were even considered (or possible?) as early as 1972. The big push for drug testing in the military, it seems to me, was several years later.