Algernon, It isn’t that I don’t’ get the logic at play here, I do. However there are some issues that bear looking at.
For example, I am not clear that this “pragmatic” response has had any kind of healthy effect. Is the const of health insurance going down? Do we have less turnover and absenteeism? Has quality of output improved? I would need someone to show me that this is the case.
Also, I am not sure how else to characterize someone watching me pee and refusing to let me flush as anything other than an invasion of privacy. Generally I have a pretty small and select group to whom I show my dick.
I agree with you. Alcoholism is a much bigger problem. So is smoking (from an insurance cost perspective at least, not from an absenteeism perspective.)
The insurance companies are not directly requiring the testing. It is purely at the discretion of the employer. The insurance rates that are charged however, are the motivation for companies to do this testing.
The point is that pre-employment drug screening catches some potential problem employees. Not all of them. Enough for them to justify the expense, both monetary and psychological. Does this sometimes result in potential good employees getting turned away? Absolutely yes. Does it catch the potential bad employees who are not drug users? Absolutely not. If we visualize a quadrant where the rows are labeled Good Employees and Bad Employees, and the columns are labeled Drug Users and Non-Drug Users, there are people in every quadrant. The screening is only attempting to identify the people in the Bad Employee / Drug User quadrant. But obviously, all it really can attempt to do is identify the people in the Drug User column.
I honestly don’t know what process our current vendor uses. I don’t know if they ask ahead of time, or pursue the matter if one of the tests comes up positive. Every employer and every drug screening company has their own policies and processes.
While this may surprise people, I do not believe in random drug testing for employees. I only will argue for pre-employement screening (even though, as Otto describes, the system can be fooled). Once on the job, how people perform their job is what matters.
Regrettably, the cost of insurance is not going down. I appreciate your request for a cite. My experiences are limited to companies I’ve been associated with, and therefore unsubstantiated. I’ll see what I can dig up.
(smile) I’m pleased to see someone demonstrate a sense of humor here. Maybe I’m a closet exhibitionist, for it doesn’t bother me personally.
Yeah but someone wearing red socks on their free time has no detrimental effect when they come into work later as opposed to someone who has been taking certain drugs.
I actually could care less. It’s not such a big deal to many of us who don’t take drugs. I can see the other side, that some of you feel it’s an invasion of privacy…however, sometimes circumstances arise where it makes things like this necessary. I’m happy it’s there to shield us from the ice heads.
Crystal meth users become increasingly violent the more they get addicted. Probably more so than an alcoholics. And judging the people I’ve worked with, some of them probably were alcoholics.
I was going to address this, but I saw that **Mauvaise ** already has. If it’s something that can be explained, what’s the problem?
Utopia? Sounds more like a plutocracy. A utopia would hold stockholders strictly responsible for the actions of the companies they invest in; company breaks the law, investors lose their money. Why shouldn’t investors be held responsible for the illegal activities they funded?
Maybe the testing lab won’t query this and just spit back an “opiates user” result, which the company interprets as “illegal drugs”, doesn’t ask for clarification, and simply tells the applicant that they aren’t going to be hired after all. The company does not have to (to the best of my knowledge) provide a reason why, in most states in the US at least, and most likely will not provide one.
Or maybe you’re on a drug in (for example) the amphthetamine family for some ailment that you’d prefer your company not know about, like ADHD (as in Abbie Carmichael’s case. Maybe even the company not jumping to conclusions and asking you “why did this result come up?” would make you wary that they’ll fire you even if you tell the truth.
Understand that I in no way mean to belittle the apparent “Ice” epidemic that you are suffering from in your neck of the woods, but I have to admit that statements like this really scare the crap out of me. They remind me in many ways of the attitudes that people take when discussing things like the Patriot Act or other loosening of controls over the government’s powers to spy on its citizens.
This notion of “I have nothing to hide, so BFD if they want to do it” is rather chilling because, in my view, we are handing over uncomplainingly very hard won liberties. Today, you are right, it may not be red socks but how far off are, say, loyalty oaths? In the end, I just don’t see how any good can come of this, and to be honest I see the potential for a lot of harm.
For what it may or may not be worth, I do not use illegal drugs
Except that it is illegal to fire someone for that reason. Employees who are on medication are protected under the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).
Does that always stop an unethical employer? Sigh. Unfortunately, no.
Honest question here. Can someone please tell me how you could possibly defend illegal drug use as a “right to privacy?” An employer has a right to know if they are employing a felon. This can have a bearing on the job in any number of ways: whether or not the person is bondable, whether or not to trust them with large amounts of cash, etc. What you do on your own time quite often has a direct effect on whether or not you are capable of discharging your job responsibilities effectively. Committing a felony and possibly getting thrown in jail directly affects your employer.
(As a side-note: I favor the decriminalization of most recreational drugs. But that will be then…this is now.)
That’s why, (if it were me) I would said what I had done BEFORE taking the test.
I can see that, but I guess in that case, if you really wanted to work there, you’d just have to comply…it is their rules.
Before y’all get outraged at me remember that Hawaii has a serious problem with ice-heads, and that is my primary reason for not minding piss tests. I’d much rather not get shot because CrazyFuck needed ca$h for his increasing drug addiction. I could care less if Joe Shmo had a toke on Sunday night.
FYI: As a former Medical Review Officer (certified whiz quiz physician) the reporting system is designed to take into account legitimate prescriptions. If the test is positive for opiates, the MRO contacts the patient, and if the MRO determines there is a legitimate prescription for opiates in the posession of the patient which accounts for the positive test, the test is reported as negative to the employer. Same for stimulants, benzos, and even for THC if the patient has a proper prescription for Marinol.
Of course if the test is positive for heroin in specific, here in the US there is no acceptable explanation which will turn that into a negative report.
I keep forgetting to say that alcoholism, from the viewpoint of the ADA, is a disease. Therefore a company is not allowed to fire someone who is an alcoholic. Nor can they test for alcohol abuse (I doubt that such a test even exists – kidney/liver damage?).
An employer can fire someone for unacceptable absenteeism or poor on-the-job performance, which is a common result with alcohol abusers.
silenus, I see where you are coming from. As I have stated before, I would define someone looking at my cock while I pee as an invasion of privacy. How else could a rational person look at this? Now I am not sure that this makes me a one who defends the actual use of said drug as part of a right to privacy.
What I can tell you is that you seem to only be looking at this through the lens of The Law. There is a whole other factor here. Namely, there is a strong cultural notion that as long as I am performing well at a job, that the time that I have away from that job belongs to me and that I am free to do with it what I wish (be it lighting up a doobie, or getting golden showers from farm animals) as long as I am not harming anyone and do not get caught. In essence, these companies are breaking a long-standing social compact, and as such are the target of much scorn and ire. As I stated earlier, if you can’t tell that I get high without running a medical test, you are cheating.
Further, it throws out the notion of the presumption of innocence. Obviously a private company has the legal right to do this or it would have been challenged in court and thrown out long ago, but it flies in the face of everything that we have been thought about how this country is supposed to work and how we are supposed to be treated.
My company was considering instituting drug testing. Know why? Because it can save manufacturing companies tens of thousands of dollars in their Worker’s Compensation costs, and BWC promotes and encourages drug testing. (This is in Ohio.)
So, sometimes it’s just a matter of survival for companies that are getting hammered by governmental organizations. When your margins are small, twenty thousand dollars can be a pretty big chunk of money.
Now that is interesting, but to clarify; do you mean that they save this money because there are less accidents, or is it a lower premium kind of thing?
Naw, I see where you are coming from, but it is not an “all or nothing” dealio when it comes to other hard-fought for rights. I’m sure there’s some other invasion of privacy that I would be outraged at.
Of course, I would LOVE for drug testing to not be necessary…but in some places, I think it’s better for the people already employed.
Last place I worked, there was a guy who had a noticeable drinking problem. Most of the time during work (well, at least all the times I saw him there) he was fine, he didn’t come into work drunk or anything. But he was absent a lot. In that kind of case, he isn’t affecting me. However, had he been an ice user, I would definitely be nervous about this guy.
Both of your paragraphs are absolutely true, which is why many people with “questionable” health issues might keep quiet.
I’ve been drug tested before as part of pre-employment screening (I’ve worked in medical centers for several years) but don’t recall if I had to write down medications. I’m assuming I did as it simply makes sense. Hopefully all the labs work in the same fashion as how QtM described it.
