Are there any studies at all that show that it’s better not to have employees who smoke pot on their time off? As opposed to having employees who drink too on their time off?
Can you show studies that say that drug testing has no other purpose than to catch people who smoke pot on their off hours?
If you don’t poison the well in this fashion I’d imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard to find a study or two justifying drug testing in real life situations.
Drinking is legal.
I think it would be very difficult for a study to conclusively draw any direct link between after-hours pot use and on-the-job performance, especially if you include that caveat of comparing it to habitual alcohol use. More likely, it’s a safe way for employers to weed out (sorry!) a certain demographic. There is no easy way for a company to deny you employment for perfectly legal off-the-job drinking-- they can fire you later on if they can prove it affects your performance, but they can still risk a lawsuit. By comparison, it’s very easy for them to fire you or not hire you for pot.
Another part of their rationale is also probably that, due to the difficulties of acquiring pot versus alcohol, even occasional pot use suggests somewhat more of a commitment to one’s substance use, as well as at least a casual connection to the criminal element.
If it was to catch people who smoke pot during work hours, it would be very easy, wouldn’t it? You just see if they are actually high at work, that must be relatively easy to do. (Bloodshot eyes, reaction time, constant Simpsons quotes…) That would be analogous to alcohol testing also. Our company allows you to drink, but not at work, and you can’t be affected by alcohol at work.
The fact that this not done for pot suggests to me that (a) it’s much cheaper/easier to have a blanket test, (b) there is some other motive in testing for off-hours usage.
Besides, why must blanket drug testing be aimed at pot? What’s the alternative? Let everyone know you’re going to drug test, so the pot smokers can abstain- oh, but crack addicts we’ve not already identified won’t, so we won’t tell them?
And it is generally illegal, after all. And willingness to step outside the law is something relevent for a company to be aware of.
Beware of making blanket statements about the U.S., since almost everything varies from state to state.
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/emp02.htm
I can’t find a date for that, so the state by state situation may have changed.
In any case, Hawaii is not one of those states and recently instituted such a policy.
:rolleyes:
In some cases, companies get reduced insurance rates if they drug test their workers.
Drug testing tests for more than just pot.
Safety is one reason they test. Vehicle and heavy machine operators, for instance. (I wouldn’t want my dentist to be strung out when he had that drill in my mouth.)
If a substance abuser had access to the cash drawer in a retail buisness, there may be concerns of an increased risk of employee theft. (I am not saying that substance abuse is the only reason for employee theft, but it’s one that can be tested for.)
Government buisness can be important to a company, and testing may be mandated by the government.
Some employers may test everyone, so it can’t/won’t be seen as discriminatory.
I don’t think there is a test that can test if you’re under the influence of marijuana at the moment of the test, is there? My understanding is that there’s only a test that can indicate that you’ve been using sometime in the past n days (usually 30, but maybe not always) by finding metabolites of THC, but not the THC itself.
Bloodshot eyes? I’ve got gas permeable (hard) contacts - my eyes are ALWAYS bloodshot. Slow reaction time? I’m a little off my game today, boss. Simpsons quotes? Okay, you got me there. 
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with your presumed opinion that blanket drug testing is fecking stupid. I think that testing should only be done if someone’s performance leads to the suspicion of use on the job. But even there, you still couldn’t prove whether or not someone was high on the job, just that they’ve been using in the same weeks they’ve been working.
The problem is that urine tests don’t measure whether your dentist is under the influence of something while he has the drill in your mouth, they measure whether he has used those substances at all in the recent past. It’s the difference between drinking on the job and drinking at home a few days earlier.
And in fact, the harder drugs which are more legitimate causes for concern tend to have shorter windows of detection. Would you rather be drilled by the dentist who smoked pot a month ago and failed his test, or the one who smoked crystal meth a week ago and passed?
Hey, you can “test” for race/ethnicity, age, marital status, and income level too, which also have an effect on crime statistics. If we’re going to say it’s OK to fire someone for belonging to a group that has a higher risk of theft, perhaps it’s time to roll back a few more civil rights laws.
Maybe not for marijuana specifically, but you can test for impairment, which is what matters anyway. This editorial suggests replacing urine testing with impairment testing:
But race, ethnicity, age, and marital status are protected classes under current laws. “Using pot on the weekends” is not. A company is perfectly within their rights to not hire someone who uses pot because they use pot. They would be in legal trouble if they were found to be not hiring people because of their race, ethnicity, age, or marital status. There’s a difference. You could argue that there shouldn’t be, but under current law, there is.
I actually had a bit in my previous post about maybe we should do impairment related firing, instead of drug test positive firing, but then I deleted it. I got caught up in my own concerns about allowing impairment to happen before taking action - that is, I’d rather my nurse NOT make a critical mistake because she’s wasted before they can shit-can her. OTOH, I don’t approve of drug testing. So I’m not sure where I stand, I guess.
ETA: Maybe I think *suspicion *of impairment should be enough to allow drug testing, but not actually waiting until something bad happens. I think I’d prefer that to random testing.
If people really believed that an employer has the general right to look at your personal life, assess the risk that you might steal from him based on aspects of your life that have nothing to do with actual theft, and fire you because of it, that difference wouldn’t matter (especially in this thread, which is about “rational justification” anyway, not legality).
They’d consider the anti-discrimination laws an unfair infringement on employers’ rights to snoop, and the law would be changed by popular demand, as I suggested in the second sentence you quoted from my post.
How about this: everyone takes the impairment test when they report for work, suspected or not (assuming it only takes a minute). If they fail the test, they go home. No one’s privacy is invaded, but everyone is protected from impaired employees, no matter what might have caused that impairment.
Yeah, I like that. Doesn’t matter if you’re impaired from pot or alcohol or cold medicine or lack of sleep, you shouldn’t be working impaired. Works for me.
Or from the cold itself. If everybody here who’s ever been at work when he was too sick to be there or had a coworker in that situation raised his hand we’d be counting, uh… how many registered members do we have?
The problem with this is that it would be a serious problem for those on low hourly wages. My wage is high enough that missing a day of work doesn’t hurt my finance (so long as my boss isn’t an idiot who’ll take it against me), but for those on minimum rates, ouch. It would require a cultural change in how “sick days” are perceived, as well.
Hypocracy, thy name is America…'nuff said.