I used to work for a nursing home that did random drug-testing (sort of; more on that in a minute). Early in my career there, the CEO’s number did, in fact, come up. He laughed about it, peed in the cup, passed with flying colors.
By the time I left there, no one had been drug-tested for as long as anybody could remember, even though officially there was a policy. It turns out that every month the HR guy would “forget” that he was supposed to select a random employee for drug-testing; I found out later that he thought the idea pointless and expensive.
I think the reason most employers that drug-test (apart from the ones that legitimately do so for safety reasons) is because drug-testing labs have convinced insurance companies that drug-testing is necessary for [insert ridiculous reason here], and thus insurance companies insist that businesses they insure carry out the testing. It’s all a big money-making racket for the drug-testing labs.
I can see testing new hires as part of their physical. If you can’t lay off long enough to get a job, there may be a problem. And I can see having the policy in place, with everyone’s signature in their files stating that they know they can be tested at any time and definitely be tested if they, say, wreck a crane.
Not sure how much effort I’d put into a monthly plan, especially for general office people. If I was in charge, and all. Do businesses get lower insurance rates if they have a regular program in place?
I have been drug tested randomly since the 70’s through the glorious military program known as Golden Flow.
In all my years of federal service I know of one person who lost a job due to failure to pass.
The program was grotesquely mismanaged for decades but thanks to 60 minutes finding out that the tests were contaminated by poor sample storage it got cleaned up.
What was amusing was that the feds were going to extend the testing to contractor personnel who worked in physically demanding skilled labor position at our facility. The universal response was “you test us, we quit”. So the contractors didn’t get tested.
Stoners who can do construction, welding, and concrete finishing can do what they want.
I’m about as white-collar as you can get (software engineer) and for the most part, drug testing is unheard of… EXCEPT one job I got at a multinational megacorporation had drug testing for absolutely everyone. Which wasn’t a problem for me, but it was definitely problematic for some folks there.
Fortunately they only seemed to do it as part of the background check and initial hiring process; the employee handbook claimed that there would be random drug screenings for all employees, but for the 5 years I was there I never heard of a drug test being administered to anyone who already worked there.
In the company I currently work for everyone is tested when they are hired (that includes the GM) and you can be picked at random for testing. Since there are far fewer managers and higher ups it seems they don’t get picked. The truth was that you could go years and not get tested and then get picked several times in a row (I hold the record of 6 weeks in a row). Some workers complained, so at one manager’s meeting they all got tested. The result the newest manager (who worked his way up from the ranks and it had been his goal to get this job) asked if he could grieve this before he got tested. Yes he tested positive for marijuana and was fired. We also test if you’re in a accident while on company time. Give that caffeine is legal I won’t have any problems, nor will 99% of the people who work here.
I have to say I would think a nursing home would be prime for drug testing. After all handing out drugs is part of the job and there is enough malpractice liability and mistakes made without them being high. Very few juries would fail to side with the family whose grandmother died because the nurse took her pain killers and gave her the wrong medication.
I remember one soldier coming off Christmas leave worried he wouldn’t pass the test. I told him he needed to tell the commander before the drug test, 100% of the company due to the break, since if you self report they’ll put you in a rehab program, strangely enough passing the rehab program counts as education points for promotion, guy didn’t see the point of getting himself since he was not convinced the test would pop hot. Long story short I never saw him again.
True, but keep in mind that each additional category of drug you add to your testing panel, the more expensive it gets. There isn’t any generic “drug” test that covers every psychotropic substance a person may ingest. You have to select–and pay for–a separate panel each for THC, amphetamine, methamphetamine (distinct from amphetamine), opiates, oxycodone (separate from opiates), barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cocaine, MDMA (ecstasy), phencyclidine (PCP), tricyclic antidepressants, etc., and even for methadone and buprenorphine, which are often abused. If you suspect a nursing home attendant of taking drugs from the facility, it might be easier and less expensive to just keep a strict count of pills that are dispensed, simply because there are so many different kinds of drugs the patients might be taking.
No there is not. In fact alcohol is not usually tested for via urine drug screen at all.
Alcohol is legal and will show up in urine for up to 80 hours after ingestion. Because of its long detection window it is not an effective test for impairment.
Which brings up a hijack.
Some companies are now testing for nicotine. Also legal and not known for causing impairment. I think the first person fired for a positive nicotine test would have a good case for a discrimination lawsuit. Anyone have any thoughts?
It would depend on where they were. Most states don’t allow employers to discriminate against tobacco users, but quite a few do. An employer in one of the former states would have to be pretty stupid to openly fire someone for testing positive for nicotine.
Another big difference between clerks and the rest of workers besides the cash drawer is that clerks spend their day doing customer service and nobody likes being served by a stoner.
My post is my cite and all that, but my father is a pharmacist who used to service nursing homes for legal and medical compliance. One of his responsibilities was to catch nursing home staff who were dipping into the cookie jar.
It’s not enough to do strict pill counts; that’s an FDA requirement anyway and people who steal are pretty damn crafty. Also, many narcotics and other abusable drugs are given in liquid form, which is much easier to steal. My father often had to be very creative and very diligent about finding not just theft, but legally acceptable proof of theft.
That said, drug testing can be problematic under the ADA and privacy laws because it’s possible to test for something and to discern someone’s medical condition from the presence of that drug, or at least to have to put the employee in the position of having to explain and get documentation that the opiate he’s taking is for a bad back or cancer, not because the employee is an addict.
Slight nitpick to Cecil’s column: the worst thing a drugged-out retail worker can do is kill someone.
All supermarkets and big-box retailers use forklifts to unload trucks in their Receiving departments, and ‘warehouse stores’ like Sam’s Club and Costco use them to stock shelves. People can and have died in Lowes or Menards.
My experience in drug scans is that they were entry-only, with no re-testing. The understanding was that the company had to pass an audit, with a commitment that they would only hire people who had passed a drug scan. It wasn’t due to any belief on their part that drug use was bad, but more the idea that without the acronymical/numerical certification they were shooting for, they wouldn’t get the big contracts, so they make the peons pee in the cup. They sure as hell weren’t going to do it more than once themselves, so they didn’t make re-testing a requirement.
Oddly enough, IBM had no drug scan requirement for employment, even though it had a strong history of being anti-drinking and anti-other stuff, to the point of calling people in on the carpet if they got drunk on their own time (like, say, vacations). We were told that, due to the contracts that we’d be working on, we might have to take a drug scan because the company that was hiring IBM to do their work had their own drug scan requirement. We asked what happened if we failed, and the trainer said they’d have to find other contracts for us to work on. He also pointed out that, in IBM’s experience, people who are going to fail a drug scan when they know they’re likely to have to take one are likely to fail in much more documentably compelling ways, like showing up late for work, performing badly at work, falling short of the mark on dress code requirements (no blue suits, thank god, but still)…
Could depend on what state you’re in. I doubt that any states explicitly list nicotine users as a protected class, and employers in “at-will” states could fire such employees . . . well, at will.
California makes an interesting illustration. We have a civil rights act called the Unruh Act that protects various classes of people. It’s a state law, nearly verbatim identical to the similar Federal law, except that it lists a few additional classes of people that are not covered by the Federal law. I think it specifically listed gender as a protected class before the Federal law did.
But it has another big difference: Being a STATE law, it has been tested in California STATE courts whereas the Federal act has been tested in Federal courts. It just so happened that a STATE court ruled that the explicitly-listed classes were just examples and that the law might actually apply to other distinct classes as well. No Federal court ever said that about the Federal law.
So, despite the similarity in the wording of the laws, the California law protects (or maybe protects) many more classes than just the listed ones, while the Federal law does not. (This would seem to imply that the California State Courts will forever be deciding cases in which Yet Another Class claims protection.) From the Wiki:
ETA: So, in California in might be illegal to discriminate against nicotine users. (I don’t know if that has ever actually been tested.)