The problem with drug testing as opposed to testing for alcohol intoxication is that the drug test does not mean the person is high right now. It means they were high at some point in the past, and that’s if the results aren’t a false positive because of OTC cold medicine or poppy seed bagels.
If a drug test could tell you whether someone was definitely high at the time of an accident, it might actually be a sound policy to follow. A drug test that can only tell you that someone smoked pot within the last two weeks, on the other hand, is stupid.
OTC cold medication can be abused by some people, and its use and abuse can cause problems when working in certain industrial situations, or when driving. In any case, drug testing is accompanied usually by a form where people report their medications.
Poppy seed bagels can cause a false positive (rarely) on an initial screen only. It can never do so on the follow up gas chromatography/mass spectrometry test.
In any case, I refer you to the problems my dad is having hiring laborers in a coking plant who don’t have coke, pot or meth in their system. Now, if you were working at a plant like this, with large machines the size of locomotives sliding along ovens on rails and unloading coal heated to a about thirteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, wouldn’t you want the guy next to you to be clean?
Since such tests are extremely expensive, how many people are summarily fired after a positive in the initial screening without further testing ever being done?
I don’t want to work in a hazardous environment with a coke or meth addict, but I wouldn’t want to be there with an alcoholic either, and alcohol is perfectly legal. I wouldn’t want to be there with someone who’s high on pot while they are working. If they were high last night or over the weekend or during their vacation, quite frankly, it doesn’t affect me at all. A drug screening isn’t going to tell you if they smoked pot on the weekend or right before they came to work. It doesn’t tell you if they are currently impaired.
The main reason I object to drug testing is that it cannot tell you whether a person is impaired at the time of testing, making it useless in determining whether drug intoxication played a role in the employee’s performance, or in an accident.
It’s similar to a prospective employer wanting to install a camera into my house to ensure that I’m not doing anything illegal during my free time. If I haven’t done anything wrong, I don’t have anything to hide, right? :rolleyes:
I think not.
Most are going to just chance it, Hope that they never get into a situation where they will be tested. Remember the only ones tested are those involved in situations. Now if it were random and everyone at some point in time was handed a piss cup they would have to make some kind of decision like you posted.
It is hard for a Union to support a policy like I posted, even when we all do want a safe work place. We also want our fellow workers treated respectfully, and fairly.
All these drug testing policies came from the last negotiation during collective bargaining. The trouble was it wasn’t very well defined at the proper time.
I’m not sure what you’re rolling your eyes about. If a drug test were like a blood alcohol test, I wouldn’t object to it. It isn’t. It’s just like putting a camera in your house. I object to it because of that.