I failed a drug test once. Turns out I was shooting up meth. This however came as a complete surprise to me. I could remember doing just about everything in the days prior to pissing in the cup. However, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember ingesting meth. I did, however, have a horrible cold at the time and was taking Sudafed and using nasal spray. That couldn’t have had anything to do with the results, could it? (That was sarcastic. Of course it could. But I was treated like a meth abusing junkie in spite of the cold medication causing the positive).
Poppy seeds can also result in a positive for heroin. But many places just fire you, and it’s up to you to put up the good fight to clear you name.
Not only is the practice of randomized drug testing repugnant, the results of the drug testing are not always accurate.
You do recognize the difference between an employer saying that when you come to work you will dress according to a company standard, although, when you go home, you can break out the kilt or skip and go naked and an employer dictating exactly what you eat or smoke on your own time?
Back in the anti-long hair hysteria of the late 60s and early 70s, I knew several guys who bought “short” wigs into which they would cram their longer tresses to meet company rules, and they were not hassled about their odd work appearance. (Heck, the National Guard had a policy accepting “short” wigs.)
On the other hand, the supporters of the anti-drug hysteria are saying that if you toke up on the first couple of days of a three week vacation, you can still be fired three months later, under the absurd claim that you present some sort of risk.
Yeah, Ross Perot used to prohibit facial hair, but one could always refuse to shave on the weekends if one really wanted to defy his patternalism. There were also a lot more programming jobs out there (at the time) whereas the silly drug testing is pretty much ubiquitous.
Just an aside, here: I don’t know how things work in your state, but the states I’ve lived in hospitals don’t actually employ physicians. With the exception of the ER, a hospital allows a doctor or surgeon priveleges to work there, but doesn’t actually employ the physician - the physician may bill the hospital for their services in an ER, but that’s as a contractor, rather than as an employee. I’ll admit that I may have things screwed up slightly, but I think that’s accurate.
I’m not sure how that is relevant, given that a very large number of companies require that their contract accountants, contract programmers, and contract engineers piss in a cup as a requirement to enter the office.
Drug testing and employee screening in general are also a big business. So, it’s not just the company deciding to do this on its own. There are people out there trying to sell it to them, the same way they get sold on the latest management fad or personality test.
Thanks for your concern. It really IS appreciated. At the moment, there are two missing persons reports out (as she has my 3 1/2 year old niece with her), supposedly their description (and the car’s plate number) are out of the national wire. There hasn’t been an Amber Alert issued yet. Mostly because I think my brother is trying to avoid doing that like the plague.
She took my niece to a theme park about an hour or so away (against my brother’s wishes…she got permission from his soon-to-be ex-wife). They stayed in a hotel that night (the cops have found that much out, anyway). And no one’s heard from them since.
So, I owe you a better debate when I’ve got things a little more under control. ;j
Nice. So when the transit bus driver who cheated on his random screening runs your sorry ass over, I can count on you to champion his cause? :rolleyes:
Whether or not they are employed by the hospital is irrelevant. Not even the ER docs are employed by the hospital. Nor are the anesthesiologists, and up to 20% of them are addicted to Fentenyl. Your surgeon can smoke crack the night before your case but the guy who mops the blood up off of the floor after he’s done is subject to testing? Could it be that the docs just tell hospitals that they aren’t subject to testing? Did Dr Gary Malakoff have to take a piss test along side of the nurses and janitors at his hospital? Not until things got way out of control, and not because of random testing.
Ohhh, I’se way too dumb for GD Plus way too much political debate in there, and religious debate, two things I don’t care to debate. The first, I’m not well educated on, so it would be silly for me to try amongst those who seem to make it their life’s work, and the second, well, I’m a christian (NOT a fundie) and I’ve heard all the arguments on both sides for decades. I guess we’ll all find out when that big comet hits eh? And one side isn’t going to convince the other side in any case. Which is pretty much true about politics too.
Plus, it seems as if the pit comes up with more interesting subjects more frequently.
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Originally Posted by CanvasShoes
When the potential consequences of the employees actions can hurt the company.
Yes, this is true. Everyone is at risk just walking out the door. But, imho, companies are within their rights to try and decrease that risk by “banning” the more risky actions.
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That is, do we just let go of all standards and let our world be a “whatever goes” world?
No darnit, I either missed it, or have forgotten it.
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If this is that important to pot smokers (and I used to be one, in Alaska when it was still legal), then they’d change the laws rather than try to force the status quo. That’s the way things are usually done.
If that particular company doesn’t want their workforce to contain drug users, yes. Sorry, it’s similar to expecting their workforce to adhere to certain work values.
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If you’re going to try and prove that drug testing is against an employees “privacy” you’ll have to prove that that outweighs the people who own the company’s rights to have the workforce they want, if those rights aren’t protected, then we’re violating THEIR rights as well.
Because the drug user is bringing his still drug affected brain onto their property. If they don’t want a drug user, they don’t have to have one. I see it as the employee “invading” the employer’s rights if he or she just decides to do whatever he or she wants. Again, no one knows how long after smoking that pot affects a person. And in fact I remember studies that show that long term use (even if its NOT done during worktime) affects the person’s overall performance.
Interesting questions all. I don’t know how you would as you say ““prove” that the right to privacy outweighs the company’s right to have the workforce they want?” Other than how they do it now, that is, to test and dismiss those who use drugs with the belief that those are underproductive, or potentially dangerous employees. I am constantly seeing “public service announcements” for how drugs affect a person’s judgment, and can impair them X times that of alcohol. I don’t know that that is true (I rarely believe anything the media can come up with), but I have known a lot of diehard potheads.
Regarding the example you bring up of the smoker, well there ARE in fact some companies who won’t hire smokers. Alaska Airlines is one of them. I have been told by other companies when applying that they are a nonsmoking company. This choice by those companies is so as to save insurance costs. And to decrease friction between smoking and nonsmoking employees. Particularly friction caused by the “smoke break” and nonsmokers being forced to breath smoke.
Then, there are plenty of companies where the employees smoke, and smoke often, right there in the office. Nonsmokers have the right to breath it, or go elsewhere for employment.
And as to the sort of assertion that what you do on your offtime can affect how and where you work. Well heck that’s not scary, that’s life. Companies ARE made up of humans, and the owners and the other employees do have rights too. If the company you work for requires a certain amount of training per year, well that’s “off time” so don’t you consider that to be invading your privacy too? They, the company is telling you what you MUST have inside YOUR own head. They won’t just “trust” that you know enough. And as in my case, my industry requires a 24 hour pee test for heavy metals. Isn’t it MY body, MY pee, MY choice if I want to know whether Ive gotten any lead over the past year of my employment? If you’re afraid that we’re going to enter some sort of “big brother” type employment force thanks to drug testing, I seriously doubt it. They’ve been doing it for decades, and it hasn’t escalated at all. In fact, in my experience, the initial RUSH to have drug free employees seems to have faded thianks to drug testing costs and hassles.
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Really, when it comes right down to it, every blasted thing that we do, or that others do, violates someone’s rights to something. Should we just go back to unggg, unnnng, caveman days and have a free for all so that no one’s rights are violated?
Living, living is full of having our privacy violated, our “rights” violated. Everything you do and say has the potential to violate someone else’s “rights”.
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If smoking pot is THAT all fired important, that you’re willing to violate an agreement with your company for “your” (collective you, not pointing the finger at anyone here) rights, then since you signed saying you would abide by them, you can’t, in all honesty say that your rights were violated anymore than the company whose rules you just broke.
Well currently I’m an unemployed bum But in September I go back to Alaska, and to my old jobs as a university PE instructor and a project manager for an environmental company. I’ve worked for various environmental or oilfield environmental consulting companies for the last 15 years. They all had company policies, confidentiality agreements and other agreements that we had to sign, even though they were “at will” we still had to sign due to some of the projects we worked on.
I didn’t mean to imply that doctors shouldn’t be subject to those same policies, only to point out a legal difference between the doctors and hospital employees.
As I replied to tomndebb, the reality is that it’s a figleaf.
Ya know? The more I think about it, the more I realize that for me, it’s not about the drug use. For me, it’s about the agreement between employer and employee. And I would feel that way about anything else just as strongly. I can see where, in so many examples people have posted, that Suzie having a recreational tok on the weekends shouldn’t really be anyone’s business but hers and the law enforcement. And certainly not some huge faceless corporation if she’s just a typewriter jockey.
My main problem is that it to change this takes away the company’s right to have the workforce it wants, but it’s not that it’s necessarily drugs that would make me feel that way, but that of the employee reading and agreeing to the company policy, and then turning around and doing what they want anyway. But then, I guess upon consideration, that’s more of a personal thing, a “they can’t tell me what to do” thing, and not really a good enough reason. I would still like to see it legalized though.
But Lezlers brings up such a good point here about the “knocks back beers on the weekend”. Because she’s right, even if a person isn’t obviously hungover, someone who had a few too many is going to be slower and less productive on Monday morning.
I don’t have anything to debate or add on this point, but it just tickled me that you “haven’t had your coffee yet”. It strikes me as funny in an ironic way. Coffee, the legal drug almost required at all office workplaces.
Well, for one thing, way too many Walmart employees are so slow and dumb as to make Home Depot employees appear to be members of a NASA thinktank, so I don’t want THEM to be suffering from a stoner hangover and be even slower.
But to be serious? Other than the lack of production in chronic users (not just weekend warriors but those like my ex who smoked every day), it really doesn’t and in fact the drug tests are really expensive. Our company had a special office in Anchorage that almost all the environmental and oilfield companies also used so the cost was supposed to be less. IIRC the cost is something like 150 per pee test. I think it was about 900 per employee to have our annuals. Our pee tests were for testing our blood to make sure we hadn’t picked up any nasties from our work though. We only got UAs upon being hired at most companies.
I agree. And some other doper, I wish I could remember who, in another thread, stated that the reason they haven’t is for lack of being able to determine intoxication.
Idiotic or not, people with less standing have sued and won…It’s in the news everyday. Part of it is that juries are STUPID.
There isn’t a logical disconnect at all. The point I was making is that having the drug screening policy in place shows some degree of dilligence in preventing someone high on a drug from causing injury for that reason.
**So let’s sum up, free of the intense arguments and appeals to emotion:
[ul][li]Random drug testing does not prevent or tangibly lessen the possibility of drug related accidents or incidents in the workplace.[/li][li]Random drug testing will not keep a nurse, high on speed because she’s on hour 13 of a 16 hour double shift, from giving a patient an overdose of a potentially lethal drug or a transfusion of the wrong blood type.[/li][li]Random drug testing will not prevent the train conductor or ferry boat operator on recreational Xanax or the airline pilot drunk as a skunk from crashing and killing dozens of people.[/li][li]Random drug testing will not prevent the CFO with a serious cocaine problem from embezzling $100,000 to pay off his drug debts and help “fix” his lifestyle so that no one knows how much of his income has gone up his nose.[/li][li]Random drug testing will not insulate a company from lawsuits nor from losing lawsuits based upon damages incurred from the misdeeds of an employee who was drug-impaired. As meerijeek noted, to suggest otherwise evidences a huge logical disconnect. “We randomly test employees, we just never picked Bob’s name out of a hat. Uh, therefore, don’t fine us, it’s not our fault that three employees who were superior to him saw him and failed to notice that he was slurring his words, walking funny and was glassy-eyed before he climbed up on that steam roller. We try to be diligent about drug use.” It just doesn’t wash. It’s not a meaningful argument, and no judge or jury would buy it unless they were stoned when the contention was made.[/ul][/li] What will random drug testing do, then?
[ul][li]Random drug testing will single out employees whose work performance is acceptable, even exemplary, and subject them to discipline or firing because of personal choices, made off the job, which have shown no sign whatsoever of affecting their work.[/li][li]Random drug testing will send the message to employees that saving money on insurance premiums is more important than having an atmosphere of trust in the workplace and between management and rank and file employees.[/li][li]Random drug testing will create a false sense of security by enforcing a mistaken belief that the fear of being caught in the drug dragnet will prevent addicts from using when, by definition, it will not.[/li][li]Random drug testing will prevent recreational marijuana users from indulging, often leaving them to choose to use a legal intoxicant – alcohol – instead, leading to hangovers in the workplace and other problems involved in alcohol use which do not exist in correlation with marijuana use, thereby actually inspiring more severe problems than would otherwise exist.[/ul][/li]
Now, what are the arguments in favor of these policies, again?
The results of drug testing also aren’t always accurate. I’m sure that a few non-partaking folk have been dismissed from their jobs due to inaccurate results. I guess that is fine until it happens to one of you “drug testing” lovers.
Absolutely opposed to any policy set up as a deterrent. Companies have no business whatsoever trying to deter their employees from using drugs on their off hours; they only have a legitimate interest in making sure their employees are sober at work. Drug testing does the former, but not the latter - it’s possible to smoke a joint, do a few lines of coke, and then pass a drug test 5 minutes later, because it takes a while for drugs to be excreted.
On the other hand, I’d fully support impairment testing that actually measures whether someone is sober at the present, rather than whether he has used drugs in the past several weeks. Contrary to what some have said, it is possible to test whether someone is under the influence of marijuana: even though a blood test might not work, you can still check reaction time, eye tracking response, etc.
I’m not seeing any bolding. I’m on Mac OS X, Firefox browser. Perhaps it’s a browser thing? (Well, it affects some browsers but not others?) How weird.
