Next time don’t post threads on the internet while high on drugs. 
A major drawback of drug tests is that most drugs except MJ are out of your system in a couple days. A person can be a total crack fiend and as long as they quit the week before a test they will pass. But if you smoke after work everyday and quit a month ago you can test positive.
Reading that article it sounds like the soft bigotry of low expectations, people are shocked that blacks aren’t all drugged out and think they found a good one when they pass a drug test (that seemed to be the jist of the article). Honestly, that would be like being surprised that black people are literate and hiring more of them based on that fact.
What’s wrong with firing people who do a shitty job and keeping those who do a good job, regardless what is or has been in their bloodstream?
That’s not true. Hair or fingernail tests can detect most substances for a lot longer than a week. When I require drug testing in my GAL cases, I always use either hair or fingernail testing. Of course, those tests are more expensive that the urine tests that are used in less demanding environments.
Yes, you can test for drug use via hair for months.
Remember when Britney Spears shaved her head and everyone was calling her crazy? Her ex-husband was fighting her for custody of their children at the time and had filed a motion for Spears to submit to drug testing. No hair means there’s nothing to test.
Well…not 'zactly. Had someone try that in a test I requested the other week. They can take hair from anywhere on the body. This woman had cut her fingernails down to the quick, and shaved her head. They took the sample from her pubes, and she lit the test up like a Christmas tree. Didn’t really matter. I had enough evidence from the statement given by the lab that I was going to consider her test positive/avoidance anyway.
A quick google search with the safe setting off will confirm that Spears had precluded that possibility as well.
No assumption. I am, in fact, talking about people who use drugs regularly. Although it’s worth noting that people who only use a couple of times a year can also have drug-related work problems.
There are people who avoid drug/alcohol use because they know it gives them trouble who now and then use and have serious results. In that sense amounts and times of use are less important than what happens in that person’s life when he uses. This can be confusing for people who think it’s the certain substance a person uses, the amount he uses or the number of days a week he uses that makes him a problem user.
There are other social users who only use on weekends whose resultant mood-altering and post-use effects carry over into his work week.
So the task remains to determine which of these people are not chemically dependent and which of them are and need intervention before their malady worsens.
The test will only show a positive or a negative for a certain mood-altering chemical. What the company chooses to do with that information depends on their Human Resources policy. I don’t know how regulated those are across state lines.
It would be necessary, especially in the case of repeated positive tests, to have a chemical dependency assessment done by a professional. That person would make the determination of whether the work problems were related to the employee’s mood-altering chemical use. His recommendations would be sent to the company’s Human Resource Director who would then enact the company’s policy.
True, but for the majority of us the only drug tests we will be exposed to are urine tests.