Employer drug testing

Great Debates
61

Several times in this thread a parallel has been drawn between criminal activity and underage drinking/smoking. The implied rationale is that the teen boozer/smoker is no better than the adult druggie so why not screen for alcohol & nicotine as well? Or conversely, we don’t screen for alcohol & nicotine in underage employees so therefore we shouldn’t screen for drugs in adults.

But when a minor has gotten her hands on a bottle of Jack Daniels and a carton of smokes, who committed the crime? Wasn’t it the sales clerk at the liquor store who sold them to her in the first place? Has the minor actually committed a crime by purchasing alcohol (or pilfering it from the parents’ liquor cabinet)?

Can an underage drinker actually be charged with a crime?

Another thing, several people have asked why not just watch employees carefully for signs of diminished performance and then fire them for that? Well, in many places diminished performance will result in termination and drug use may or may not have something to do with it. But in a union shop, it is very difficult to fire somebody unless they have been caught red-handed stealing or have committed some serious offense (insubordination, assault, sabotage, etc.). In a union shop you really want your hiring filters to be as fine as possible. An ounce of prevention, you know.

62

Sgt. J, you believe that drug abuse affects employees’ performance.

Therefore, you also want to believe that a urinalysis will somehow filter these people out.

But this thread has already shown that alcoholics, cocaine addicts, and heroin addicts can beat the test by abstaining for as little as twelve hours. It has also shown that false positives are as close as your corner bakery.

We haven’t even begun to discuss how many drug tests only sample randomly, or how one can evade such tests.

If you drug test, there is a chance you may filter someone out who uses drugs. There is also a chance that you will not filter someone out who uses drugs, and be lulled into a false sense of security.

There is also the chance that you have failed to filter someone out who uses drugs all the time and is clever and devious enough to subvert such a test. And that person, whom you now trust because the whiz quiz tells you so, will have access to your books.

And there is the chance that, because so many Americans do use drugs, the best person for the job will walk away from your interview and never return your calls. And there is also the chance that the best person for the job eats bagels, and will be filtered out.

You are using the test to justify your fears, legitimate or not, and when it comes around to bite you in the ass, you’re going to blame the drugs, not your faulty and invasive reasoning.

Good luck with your new business.

63

I’m not worried about the person who has enough self-control to knock off long enough to pass an initial drug screening. I will feel confident knowing I have ( :slight_smile: ) weeded out anyone too dumb or addicted to stop using drugs while job hunting.

I live in an “at will employment” state. I don’t have to hire you if you can’t work the days I need you (now I have to ask my Lawyer about that, too). Would I discriminate against someone who couldn’t work Sunday if I need the person filling that position to work Sunday? You bet your ass I would! I’m opening a Business, not an altruistic socialist program to create jobs for the proletariat.
Mr 2001, I have no Idea if you use drugs or not. I was making a joke of sorts (hey, it cracked me and yosemitebabe up, which is double the people who normally find me funny). Sorry if I offended you.

64

I’m religious, and generally try to not work Sundays. I wouldn’t expect to be hired by someone who needed me on Sundays. I would, however, be annoyed if they hired me, (knowing I couldn’t work Sundays) and then changed their minds and tried to insist I work Sundays. (This happened to me once, BTW.) But that’s not what Sgt. J plans on doing.

Mr2001: You may think that drug use is a benign thing, but it often isn’t. Being black is a benign thing. Eating caramel corn is a benign thing. Drug use can be pretty damned intrusive, yes, on the job. I’ve seen its effects at some of my jobs. When a person is a drug user, they sometimes bring it to work. So, why should Dr. J take that additional risk? He has to deal with enough risks as it is - some risks he is FORCED to accept (by law). But drug use is something he is NOT forced to accept (by law). So why, pray tell, should he take the risk on anyway? He’s not forced (by law) to consider people who won’t work Sundays, and he is not forced (by law) to take drug users. Sure, he may not be able to weed (:D) out all drug users, but why is he obligated to do NOTHING?

It is not illegal to not want to hire a drug user - is it? If he does not feel that the drug user would be a “good fit” in his business, why do you think he should consider the drug user anyway?

65

It is in my state, at least… I suspect most states have similar laws. Even an underage smoker can be charged with a crime. From the Revised Code of Washington:

Here’s a link to a similar section about alcohol, and here’s an addendum setting minimum sentences for alcohol violators between the ages of 18 and 21.

Without evidence, you can call any activity benign or malignant, but it doesn’t mean very much. If a cheese-corn advocate says, “Eating caramel corn is a destructive behavior that causes trouble in the workplace and should be stopped,” we can reply, “Where are the studies that support your position?” And we would proceed to ignore his theories if he didn’t have any evidence.

So, well, where are they? Is there evidence that responsible drug use actually has a negative impact on job performance, or that drug testing leads to benefits such as higher productivity?

Any screening factor is okay as long as it’s not prohibited by law?

I disagree. Discrimination against applicants of a certain religion, race, or marital status is not wrong because it’s illegal; it’s illegal because it’s wrong. I contend that discrimination against responsible drug users is also wrong but happens to be legal (see also: discrimination against homosexuals).

What’s worse is that discriminating against drug users involves a humiliating chemical test. If my employer wants to discriminate against atheists, I can say “I’m not an atheist, I’m a Christian,” and how is he going to prove I’m not? If I can act like a Christian I’ll get the job, no matter what I think when I’m off the clock, or how “malignant” my employer might think those beliefs are.

One last thought - employers can’t administer lie detector tests to applicants (in most situations), supposedly because they’re unreliable. Drug tests are far less reliable, and far less informative. A lie detector test would be much more helpful to employers, since instead of trying to detect past use, they could ask questions that matter: “Are you addicted to any drugs or alcohol? Have you ever come to work drunk or high?”

66

Yeah. There have been cites given on this thread. You just choose to disregard them, and prefer to take other studies more seriously. I have never heard of any “evidence” of caramel corn abuse. The same cannot be said for drugs. You know this.

Let me ask you this: Is it beyond the realm of possiblity that someone might come to work high? Is this possiblity more likely than a person coming to work under the influence of caramel corn? Your comparisons of drug use and caramel corn are absurd.

Come ON. Where are the “caramel corn rehab centers”? Are you really trying to tell us that NO ONE ever has problems with drugs, and that NO ONE ever brings these problems to work? If Sgt. J has witnessed drug problems on the job (I have, spooje WAS a “drug problem” at work) then why is it so unreasonable to WORRY about drug problems at his work? Why shouldn’t he be allowed to not hire drug users if he worries about the risk they may bring him? There ARE stats that back up his concerns. Just because you don’t like them, or don’t think they are valid, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

The drug testing process may be imperfect, no doubt. But to think that no employer should have a concern about drug abuse being a problem at work, (which you seem to be suggesting) is absurd. People use drugs, and they sometimes use them at work. Hell - I remember hearing about some of my co-workers smoking joints out in the parking lot. They were useless most of the time, and we were on a tight schedule. The rest of us had to pick up their slack. Hell yeah, their drug use use was a PROBLEM in regards to productivity.

I doubt that what I witnessed is terribly rare. Far less rare than caramel corn abuse.

67

I’m going to ask for a cite to establish the claim that drug tests (specifically urinalysis, since that seems to be the one most mention here) are ‘more unreliable’ than lie detectors.

Urinalysis is admissable in court as evidence (I’ve testified to results in probation violation cases). Lie detectors are not.

68

One of the problems here is that we’re working with two different ideas. Mr2001 keeps using the term “responsible drug use”. Yes, people can use drugs responsibly and be the best employee in the company. Responsible drug users are by definition RESPONSIBLE. The problem is IRRESPONSIBLE drug users, who even Mr2001 I’m sure would agree are a liability to employers.

Here’s the reason I don’t have a problem with drug testing and you do:

I don’t care if the "responsible drug users’ get screwed out of the job. I want to make it as difficult as possible for someone dumb enough to be using drugs while or just prior to job hunting. Again, I don’t care about “RDU’s”. I don’t care if you get a job or not. I want to keep IDU’s out of my business. Why should I care if you CHOOSE to VOLUNTARILY do something that hampers your employability? I have the right as an American to hang a Coke can from my nose ring and wear a tinfoil hat. I don’t have a right to get a job looking like that.

You don’t have a right to work at my business.

In a free market society I as the business owner get to choose who I hire (under legal guidelines) and how I run things. If I have legal but morally reprehensible practices, society will judge that and people are free to boycott. You want to stop drug testing?
Either,

A) Vote for politicians who will make it illegal
or,
B) Organize boycotts of businesses that practice drug testing.

The problem you’re going to run into is there isn’t enough popular support for the rights of RDU’s to accomplish either.

69

Now we’ve went and let this (debate?) drift from the original opinion, that an employer has no right to delve into an employee’s private life on matters which do not affect his/her job performance.
The OP even offered an alternative which could measure the employee’s fitness for work, regardless of the cause of any impairment. The cause is not really material. My safety at work is.
And there’s the problem, I think. People get so worked up about the moral and legal aspects of drug use that they sometimes lose sight of the real issues; safety and productivity.
I would venture that an employee who had a fight with tha SO, and came to work with only two or three hours sleep is more impaired than the one who smoked a joint the night before and got plenty of sleep.
Impairment testing is real-time, and meaningful. Piss testing just isn’t.
Peace,
mangeorge

70

In addition, here is information about drug detection periods. A heroin user can pass a drug test by abstaining for 8 hours; I don’t believe there is such a well-known, straightforward method to fool lie detectors.

I had a response for yosemitebabe and Sgt. J, but the board ate it… I’ll write it again tonight. In short, the only cite I see is the ony Demise picked apart; and as mangeorge points out, “someone might come to work high” is an argument for impairment testing (which I advocated in the OP), not past use testing.

71

Huh? Just because she “picked it apart” to your satisfaction does not mean that it is not a valid cite.

I’m sure more cites can be found easily enough. I remember a thread we had a while ago on this very subject, and there were cites a-plenty supporting the problem of drug use in the workplace.

You just choose to ignore those cites, because you don’t like them. But Sgt. J doesn’t have to ignore those cites. He has a business, he can decide that the cites he’s found (including government cites) is enough reason for HIM TO DECIDE that he doesn’t want to hire drug users. And, he can couple that with his own personal observation of drug use in the workplace. He still gets to have a choice. Too bad if you don’t like it. Illegal drug users are not a protected group when it comes to hiring practices. But, as Sgt. J has already said, feel free to take it up with your local politicians, feel free to try to protest and make changes. No one is stopping you.

When you start your own business, you can bend over backwards to hire drug users, if you like. But Sgt. J is not obligated to do that.

72

You ever seen a heroin user after 8 hours of not using heroin? It’s not pretty. There aren’t too many responsible, recreational heroin users. And most of them are not out there applying for jobs.

Here’s some anecdotal evidence. In a sense, I am the reason for drug testing. Before I got clean, I used dope. I used it at home. I used it at work. There were others at work who also used. I know this, because I used with them. One of them was actually my dealer. We were’nt all that productive when we were loaded. When you’re loaded, it’s hard to care about work. We took a lot of days off because of hangovers. We were often late. Very often. We made many, many errors because of intoxication. Occaisonally, there were accidents because of our intoxication. There was certainly a lot of employee theft…

Now, you could argue that I and my cohorts were exceptions to the rule. That most drug users are very responsible people, and only a few bad apples mess it up for everyone else.

Personally, and just MHO, I think responsible drug users are an urban myth. I know for a fact that there are a lot of irresponsible users out there.

73

Mr2001 - your first site makes a statement, does not give source data to back it up. In addition, it also makes another statement “20% of labs returned tests that were false positives” this is a very bizarre statement - since it also means that 80% of the labs don’t ever, and doesn’t give any idea of how often those 20% do - which makes it sound very reliable (ie, if 80% of labs don’t return false positives, and if - and we don’t know how often or the relative numbers- those 20% of labs that do, only do 1% of the tests and only return false positives 3% of the time… etc).

as for the statement “don’t do drugs for this period of time and your test will be negative” = method of ‘faking out the test’ (Paraphrased), well, no.

In your example, ‘don’t do drugs just before the test’ will return a correct ‘negative’ result, and the corallary is ‘don’t lie during the test’ and the lie detector will come out ok.

the other issue that you fail to account for is tester sensativity.

any time you have humans dealing w/tests there’s possability of human error. However, w/lie detectors, there’s also tester bias, which is not an issue w/the urinalysis.

Most companies that I’m aware of use medical labs to perform the tests. If your claim is that generally speaking, medical labs come up w/wrong results 20% of the time, I’d say you’d really need to establish that. The process for the law enforcement agencies that I’ve worked w/ is different in only one respect - w/these, they need to preserve a chain of evidence, so the person giving the specimin initials a seal that would demonstrate that no one altered the specimin, the specimin is under lock/key and there’s a definitive chain of custody. In a medical lab, the testee hands the specimin over to lab personel, and there’s not necessarily a signature required.

From my experience (14 years working w/urinalysis) the person w/the greatest ability (and motive) to screw around w/the specimin is the person giving it.

So, still looking for your proof that urinalysis is ‘much less reliable’ than lie detectors.

74

The fact that it is necessary to use a urine or hair sample to determine whether I do or do not do drugs speaks volumes about this issue. If you must go to these extremes then you probably have no business knowing the answer because my personal activities are not affecting my job.

75

Then you have no business in my store. I don’t spend a week interviewing and evaluating min. wage counter help. That’s part of what pre-employment screenings do. It’s a “moron test”. If you can’t knock off your Illegal drug use long enough to get a job I don’t want you.

76

He. :slight_smile:

I didn’t really “pick apart” the cite. However, I did show its blatant bias, which does reduce its value as a cite, at least for me.

A link would be nice then.

That’s kind of harsh, since you haven’t actually linked to or provided any cites.

Agreed, even if it is unfortunate.

While I can’t really answer this for Mr2001, I can say that I think he’s comparing the time it takes for different drugs to work through your system and not get detected by a test. If heroin is undetectable by a urine test 8 hours after using it, what good is the drug test?

Answer: it catches marijuana users. Great. The least harmful Schedule 1 drug possible, but the one that you’ll test positive for for the longest period of time. Hair follicle tests are even worse. What fucking difference does it make if I smoked pot one weekend a year ago? Well, for one, I might fail a follicle test, depending on how long my hair is. I guess it’s good for getting rid of hippies…

Yeah, that’s fair. If I “knocked off[ed] [my] Illegal drug use” an entire year ago, but can still fail a follicle test, does that mean I fail the “moron test”?

What about the fact that there are many ways that a real drug abuser can pass a urine test? As long as you are ignorant to their drug use, it’s ok?

The only way you’ll ever find out if a “druggie” who knows how to pass piss tests is working for you is if they are high at work. So what’s the difference?

77

No, that means you voluntarily did something illegal that limited your employability. Besides, I’m not planning on follicle tests. I’m interested in now, not last year.

So you’re saying since some people are smart enough to get around the test I shouldn’t screen the dumb ones out? How does that help my business?

Can anyone here show a cite for employers being more productive with drug users on staff than without?

78

Demise heroin, 8 hours?? since when? last time I was involved w/urinalysis, heroin showed up for up to 72 hours after use. Cocaine **could ** (not the same as ‘would’) get out of the system within that short of time.

79

Actually wring, I have no idea how long heroin stays in your system. I used heroin and “8 hours” as an example since it was used earlier in the thread. My fault for not checking the accuracy of the statement. I assumed it was correct since no one challenged it eariler.

If heroin can be out of your system in 72 hours, are most opiates the same?

If cocaine can be undetectable after 8 hours, I assume crack is similar?

Marijuana, OTOH, is detectable in your system for at least a week, but can easily stay much longer. In your experience, does any other common drug have the same length of detectability?

Sgt. J:

How does it help your business to decide that everyone who fails a drug test is dumb? Is that the only way you measure the intelligence of your employees? Maybe I’m just super-perceptive, but I can usually figure out someone’s general intelligence after talking to them for 5 minutes. That is what an interview is for, after all.

I’d fire someone who showed up for work high, just like I’d fire someone who showed up for work drunk. Otherwise, I couldn’t care less.

Really, the thing that bothers me the most is that drug tests are more likely to catch a even a casual user of marijuana than anything else since marijuana stays in your system so long. I don’t even qualify as a casual user, but I think that it is ridiculous to deny someone a job based on the use of a drug that is no more or less harmful in general than alcohol.

80

Heroin, and other opiates up to 48- 72 hours, cocaine (which includes crack, it’s the same drug, just different method of injestion) was 8-48 hours (IIRC - the upper limit may be less) , and no, I knew of no drug that potentially stayed in the system as long as Mj. Most were out after the 72 hours, the reason mj stayed longer potentially was that it went into fatty tissue, and then would be detectable for longer periods of time. But, of course, it’s not always detectable for that long. Intermittent use wouldn’t be likely to stay any longer - it was always referred to ‘chronic use’ can stay up to x amount of time.

from the standpoint of law enforcement (which was my source), folks would often be ordered to drop up to 3 times per week, which meant if you were doing, you were likely to get caught.

IME, if some one was a casual user of opiates, cocaine etc, (anything other than mj), it should be a fairly simple thing to refrain from use while job seeking. If one couldn’t refrain from use, I’d suggest that perhaps the use was more than casual.

for some one with a good habit going, refraining from use for any length of time was likely to produce other noticable symptoms that would likely exclude them (who’d hire some one who was sweating profusely while scratching at their arms… for example - not that all users blah blah blah).

ANyhow. My personal stance is: employer has right to hire who they choose, and pretty much on whatever basis they choose (except those items specifically disallowed). Employee has right to not apply etc. People in general have right to frequent businesses that have such a policy or boycott.

From the proliferation of places advertising ‘drug free work place’ (staples?? geez), it would seem that in this marketplace, the policy seems to have more fans than detractors. OTOH, for all you slippery slopers, I also see active boycotting of places that seem to have ‘not approved of’ discriminatory hiring practices.