I’ve got to use a different search engine. **yosemitebabe
**'s sites are better than mine.
Daniel - Leaving the issue of drug testing itself aside, I’ve never been impressed by the “Don’t take the job if you don’t agree with the terms” line of argument. The courts generally aren’t either. If every job insists on you following rule X then where does my choice go?
I 100% know what you’re saying and since drug-taking is illegal the courts are hardly going to insist on the employees’ rights to be allowed to use them, but this particular line of reasoning seems fallacious to me.
Laws exist (whether in the US or not I’m not sure) for minimum wage, maximum hours and a whole host of other working conditions where the employee could choose to not take the job. Why do the laws exist? Because in reality that choice would be no choice at all.
regards,
pan
Danielinthewolvesden and yosemitebabe, let’s take the debate over my personal style over to the Pit. I will confine myself to logical arguments on the topic of the OP here.
Everyone agrees that drug testing is intrusive.
The pro-testing side says,
- Drug use has some real-world negative consequences.
- Drug use is illegal.
- Drug testing might mitigate some of those consequences.
- An employer may take intrusive measures to mitigate negative consequences of an illegal activity.
- Therefore drug testing is moral.
The problem is that this argument (whether you like it or not) applies to any conditions and remedies that fulfill the same conditions.
- X has some real-world negative consequences.
- X is illegal.
- Intrusive measure Y might mitigate some of those consequences.
- An employer may take intrusive measures to mitigate the negative consequences of an illegal activity.
- Therefore Y is moral.
You cannot accept the drug testing argument without accepting the generic argument. This is a matter of simple logic. Of course we’re not talking about sexual activity, theft, murder. What we’re saying is that if you apply the generic argument to drug testing, you then have the burden of proof either to rebut the the generic argument’s application to the other circumstances, or admit that the argument properly applies to those circumstances and accept the consequences.
I have seen no one dispute the first two premises. We are disputing the third and fourth (as I read others’ arguments). First, by “intrusive” we mean unnecessary and without probable cause.
Premise #3 can, in theory, be scientifically determined. I’m not sure that it has yet.
Premise #4, though, is the weakest, and it is there that I’m concentrating my opposition.
My refutation of this premise rests on two pillars:
-
The compulsion of an intrusive measure without cause, regardless of necessity, is never acceptable in a free society.
-
An employer’s demand is not consensual unless clear, immediate necessity prompts the demand.
#1 is fairly easy. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution clearly denies the government the power to compel by force (coerce) the imposition of intrusive measures without cause and due process to determine that cause. This amendment flows directly from my premise #1 above. You cannot rebut this premise (assuming we don’t get too picky about the definition of “compulsion”, which comes directly into play in premise #2) without also accepting that the Fourth Amendment does not rest on a moral foundation.
#2 is more tricky. Of course, you could take the Libertarian position that any transaction that does not involve the initiation of force is by definition consensual. As I understand Libertarian philosophy, drug testing is very clearly permissible and moral under its assumptions. Since my whole argument collapses under a Libertarian philosophy, I won’t bother to argue it. But if you do not accept the Libertarian definition of injustice and immorality flowing only from the inititiation of force (or fraud), then #2 becomes pretty strong.
We have a great deal of evidence that employers have the economic power to compel their employees, and that they have used this power contrary to the interests of their employees. I refer to the large body of laws and regulations protecting employee’s rights and freedoms, including minimum wage laws, workplace safety laws, and employee liability shield laws[sup]1[/sup]. On their face, these laws depend on their morality on the presumption that the employer-employee relationship is not fully consensual. It is not as thoroughly non-consensual as the individual’s relationship to the government (we don’t have the ability to switch governments if we don’t like a particular law), and thus employers have a great deal more latitude than the government. But our laws themselves recognize that employers do have a significant power of compulsion, which must be countered by force of law.
[sup]1[/sup]Almost all (perhaps all) states shield an employee from liability when acting as an agent of his employer.
spooje, your url FREE STATE Superb Drug and Alcohol testing is both a commercial site and obviously biased.
yosemitebabe’s cites are not obviously biased, but I’m skeptical of their data and reasoning.
Columbia University College of P & S Complete Home Medical Guide makes a number of assertions, but does not even cite actual studies supporting them. Its value is limited.
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs in the Workplace does have cites but contradicts the first site’s numbers; estimating $100 billion in damage (~5% of our $2+ trillion dollar economy; I really want to see the actual methodology used to generate this number), rather than $60 billion from the first site. This large a variance leads me to suspect that we’re not dealing with really rigorous numbers here.
It also asserts that 91% of heavy drinkers and 90% of drug users had not missed a day because of a hangover (and how a drug user gets a hangover, an effect unique to alcohol, I don’t know (I know, presumably they mean the ill effects of “come down” that I know from personal experience that marijuana doesn’t have)); that 94% of heavy drinkers and 85% of drug users have never shown up to work drunk or high.
It does not show the relative numbers of ordinary responsible people to the number of heavy drinkers and drug users. Guessing 5% of all people are heavy drinkers, and 1% are illegal drug users (and it doesn’t break illegal drug use down by type; in a decade of use, neither I nor any of my friends ever missed a day of work because of marijuana), then we are talking about imposing an intrusive, humiliating procedure on the 99.9% of people who never have a problem with drugs in the workplace, to capture a fraction of those who mostly use a benign drug (marijuana). This site does not even demonstrate that drug testing would be effective in mitigating the supposed harm that drug use causes in the workplace.
Additionally, it recommends using the compulsory power of the paycheck (disingenously called an “incentive”) to compel not only unspecified (they don’t place any restrictions) measures to remove users of illegal drugs from the workplace, but also legal consumers of alcohol and tobacco. They explicitly call for “no substance use for employees”. Not “no substance use at work”, not even “no illegal substance use”, but “no substance use”. And they don’t seem to place any restrictions on what measures to achieve this goal of “no substance use by employees”. If there was any evidence for a slippery slope going on here, you have handed it to us.
(Note for gun owners: I’m applying the slippery slope argument as moving from a small infringement to a larger one. I do not object to reasonable measures in accordance with Constitutional philosopy, nor do I argue that those reasonable measures expose us to a slippery slope).
The third URL is from England, a country with an significantly different philosophy on personal liberty than ours.
Look, I’m not in favor of serious drug use. But I don’t think that surrendering our liberty and privacy is the appropriate way to address this problem, especially since the most common drug found by drug tests is marijuana, the one that causes the least problems (as I know from personal experience). Drug use is a medical problem, not a law-enforcement problem. Shifting the burden of a law-enforcement solution from the police to employers to circumvent Constitutional protections is reprehensible.
OK, for those of you who missed it the first two times it was posted
www.aclu.org/news/1999/w121599a.html
It’s hard to find sites that quote from actual scientific studies, largely because of the commercial interests hogging all the bandwidth…
ok, let’s try again
I think my cites show that (at least for many people) there is a reason to believe that drug users pose a risk. They look at these kind of studies, and feel justifyably concerned. Hence the parents of the people I look after want to have drug testing. It isn’t just “prejudice”, based merely on their own ignorance.
>1 Nope. Or at least the Oxford Dict def of intrusive/intrude, ie “…uninvited or unwanted, force oneself abruptly on others” does not. See, I gotta take a piss, anyway, so why not use the little bottle? And my job is one of those where most would agree drugs testing SHOULD occur, so i “welcome” the test.
>2 Never said widespread drug testing is “moral”. I said the employer had a RIGHT to do so. I have a RIGHT to do a lot of things that are not moral. Nor do I say drug testing is “immoral”. I do think that Drug testing is a GOOD & moral thing for some occupations, but I am neutral otherwise. Since Yosemite knows her job better than we do (and she is a pretty sharp cookie), I am willing to accept that her job, like mine, is one of those.
>3 Gee, I really hate to use the “L word”, but I AM using the Libertarian arguement. Despite my attacks on Libertarianism as a practical form of Government (it ain’t), I am more or less a Libertartian at heart. Note my other positions on Gun control, abortions etc- all libertarian.
>4 Yes, and if the employees can change the LAW, more power to 'em. In California, random employer drug testing is ILLEGAL, which is fine with me, also. If employees do not work hard to change the Law, then it can’t be that important to enuf of them, then can it?
yosemitebabe:
Perhaps “prejudiced” was the wrong word - what I meant was that you support drug testing in this case because some people believe that off-hours drug use poses a risk, for whatever reason, not because it has actually been shown to pose a risk. I believe Joe Malik has covered the certainty of that risk.
There are about 20 million illegal drug users in the U.S. That would work out to $5,000 per person, per year. And that’s not counting all the drug users without jobs (unemployed, students, etc). Call me crazy, but those numbers seem just a wee bit skewered.
If you’ll notice, many of the studies the site cites are from the good 'ol U.S. government. This is the same government that has a history of sponsering bogus studies to support their claims about drugs. If you lie to me once about a subject, I might let it slide. A couple dozen fraudulent studies and you’ve lost my trust completely.
BTW, I have to say that this is the first thread I’ve ever seen where somebody cited a slide show. 
Oh, you mean the same Joe Malik who has just self-destructed over at the Pit? Mr. “Emotionally Stable”? (Sorry, I am still being entertained by that thread he started.)
I provided valid links, with statistics that are considered valid by many people. Mr. Malik can find reasons why he doesn’t agree with the links. It doesn’t mean that I have to agree with him, these parents have to agree with him, or the State has to agree with him.
More links of interest:
Construction companies that test for drugs reduce workplace injuries, Cornell student’s study finds.
Alcohol & Other Drugs: The Invisible Names On Your Payroll.
Drug use and abuse remains a serious workplace problem.
Drugs in the Worplace - from Courier-Journal.
Facts and Figures about Drugs and Alcohol in the Workplace. (From Dept. of Labor)
Substance Abusers - Terminate or Threat?
I am sure one can find articles that will disagree with the ones I’ve provided. But the point I’m trying to make is this: The belief that drugs in the workplace is a problem is not a rare belief, and this belief is not without foundation. And there is also a belief that drug testing can help this problem.
yosemitebabe:
From one of your very own links…
The main point of most of these seems to be that employees who are drunk or high at work are responsible for accidents. Again, why not just use tests that measure immediate intoxication or ability to perform the job? A drug test won’t detect someone who drinks on the job, but a breathalyzer will.
So all they’re saying is that they couldn’t prove nor disprove that drug testing deters drug use.
Hey - what about the link I provided which gave data about drug testing reducing accidents at construction sites? What about the other links I provided? What about 'em?
This is a quote from something I posted previously, in regards to my own job:
What exactly are you proposing? That my employers just wait around until someone screws up, and then test them? Or test them at the beginning of each shift, to see if they are drunk or high?
Look, I’m talking about a real world job, and about employers who have an incredible responsibility. And also who have an incredible risk of liability. I don’t think you understand this. What kinds of jobs have you held? Have you ever had a job simular to mine? Do you understand all that goes on? Do you understand the risks? From your responses, I do not think so.
The country of Canada must not understand, either. Almost nobody gets drug tested there. It seems to work for them.
You know, there are a hell of a lot of people stealing from their places of employment. Perhaps we should strip search all workers when they go home for the day. Plus, many people fall asleep on the job and cause accidents. I’m going to start lobbying for mandatory random wakefulness testing! We should also have a couple of fellows going door to door to make sure all employees are asleep before 11 PM. Rights, shmites! It’ll save MONEY! :rolleyes:
That’s an awful lot of links, yosemitebabe. I’ll have to be honest, though. I haven’t looked at a damn one of them. When it comes to this subject, how does one know which resources he can trust? It’s sad that so many people have to lie about this.
Hell, it would probably work better than the current system. I work with truck drivers who are required by federal law to take random tests. I’ve asked around. Most of them haven’t been tested in three or four years!
I read the Cornell study. The study consisted of a quick and dirty survey asking employers if they did drug tests and if so, was there any reduction in accidents as a result, and a statistical analysis of accident rates. There was no analysis of whether the accidents that did occur were related to employee intoxication.
There were a lot of factors that it didn’t take into account.
Like the fact that a lot of construction companies that don’t drug test might be more concerned with running their operations on the cheap than they are with on-site safety.
Might be compaines that pay substandard wages, and hire a lot of inexperienced workers, immigrant workers who don’t speak English and thus may not fully understand safety warnings, or workers who are generally jackoffs who can’t get good paying jobs… And might have a lot of on-site safety hazards that are not related so much to employee misbehavior as they are to a desire to cut corners and thus cut costs…
Don’t just brush this off. You should read the newspapers here in Vegas. Construction companies are constantly being cited for safety violations, and usually get nothing more than a small fine.
I’ve read the Cornell study. It consisted of a quick and dirty survey done by a student, asking employers if they did drug testing, and a statistical analysis of accident rates. There was no analysis of how many of the accidents were actually caused by employee drug use.
There were a lot of factors the study did not take into account.
Like the fact that construction companies that do not do drug testing might generally be trying to run their companies on the cheap. Such companies may pay substandard wages and employ inexerienced workers, immigrant workers who do not speak English, and thus may not fully understand safety warnings, or workers who are just plain jackoffs who can’t get better paying jobs because of poor work records.
These companies may also have a lot of on-site safety hazards that are not so much a result of employee misbehavior as they are of the company cutting corners in order to keep costs down.
Sorry about the double post.
One more note- after checking yosemitebabe’s links, I discovered that these cited use statistics and figures that ** have been refuted**. I checked your links, chick. It is apparent that you didn’t check mine.
:rolleyes:
One link, from a source highly motivated to refute what they want to refute. Of course, the same can be said for the links I provided. But I have a lot of 'em. And there were more where that came from.
You believe the studies you want to believe, I’ll do the same. It’s clear we are not going to agree with, or accept each other’s links.