Sure. That was my point. Was this one of those petrol stations where you have to perform brain surgery, pilot a jumbo jet, infiltrate a terrorist network, become president of a large country and land a three man crew on the moon?
'Cause if it wasn’t, their application process could seem a little excessive!
Some of our business is with the government, and we don’t have to take any drug tests, or be investigated or anything like that.
As a practical matter what impact does drug abuse by employees have in mostly professional and technical jobs (I’m assuming your job falls in that category). Is it big, small or indifferent?
Any HR types know? Do the drug tests in these job classes help or hurt employers re assembling a quality workforce?
I’ve heard of people who are under the constant threat of drug tests. Any little mistake they make on the job, the employer will give them an automatic drug test. Because of this, they have reasoned that since marijuana will remain testable in their system for such a long time that they are safer doing a more “soluble” drug like cocaine that will leave their system and remain undectectable. So now, these occasional pot smokers are racing snowblowers.
I know, it’s not an excuse,but this was their reasoning. These people like their recreation time on days off and this was their solution… now they’re addicts.
My office does random drug testing quarterly, but here it’s understandable. We have raw narcotics and other prescription drug ingredients in bulk on the premises, and the DEA is here all the time (just yesterday, in fact!) doing inspections and stuff. They have to do the testing to keep the license to have these chemicals. They don’t have a mandatory test as a part of the hiring process, though.
I completely understand why they do it here and at some other places, depending on what kind of business they do, but at some places it’s just silly. I’m not into drugs at all, but I’m completely paranoid about possibly being around them now because of the testing.
I wish I had the same guts as you, DNT. I’ve taken them before when I needed the job. I’m the only wage-earner in my family, and I’d be afraid to turn down a good offer when looking for a job (given that everything else was OK), for fear I wouldn’t get another.
Nonsense? Hardly. The US Navy instituted mandatory drug testing in the '70s, in part, because autopsies on pilots that had crashed their planes showed a significant number (though not all, of course) of them had detectable levels THC in their blood stream. In the years immediately after the testing began, these incidents sharply decreased. Obviously, the pilots weren’t toking up in the cockpit just before landing - they had done this on “their own time.” And that’s just one example.
kayT Section 702 of that link specifically states a workplace must be drug-free to receive Federal money:
(a)(1) No person, other than an individual, shall receive a grant
from any Federal agency unless such person agrees to provide
a drug-free workplace by …
… and then it goes on to describe the requires to call a business drug free with respect to Federal funding. Seems pretty clear to me. YMMV for various reasons.
In the OP’s case, any privately owned company that he/she would apply to has the right to screen out users of illegal drugs before hiring them. Then, after that, fire/discipline workers with on the job behavior problems. But now they have one less group of misfits to worry about.
Guts? I wish I had the same luxury as you to turn down a good job offer due to such a relatively minor issue (and I agree with you about the drug testing thing, I just don’t have that kind of luxury)
You’re absolutely making the wrong decision!!
You know, maybe it would be better to take the job and then try to change their policy. They’d be ten times more likely to accept criticism of their drug policy from a current employee in good standing (who passed the drug test) than from some guy who turned down the job (who presumably uses, since he declined the test). And maybe it’s outside sources that require them to test people, like insurance holders, contractors, the govn’t, etc. You might be making a stand, but it will fall on deaf ears.
If you make the same stand as an employee in good standing, however…
Huge discounts, depending on circumstances. My company pays tens of thousands of dollars per year less because of instituting a Drug Free Workplace.
We’re in manufacturing, but we’re not very big. For bigger companies, this money would have to be astronomical.
I call BS on this. The old “Entry Level Drug Theory/Scare Tactic”.
People I’ve known did not switch to coke when pot got scarce, they drank if anything.
People addicted to coke won’t care about the ‘future’ drug tests either. And I know lots of pot heads who never ever used coke, much less became addicted to it. Not to mention, a coke addiction is an incredible money pit. Coke addicts are more detectable than pot heads also, IMHO.
I imagine the motivation for all these tests is that they have to be extra careful because you’d be handling cash. Because everyone knows that if you’re a pothead, before you know it you’ll be robbing the till in order to keep your supply of “reefers” coming in. Because it’s not like you’d have to balance your cash drawer at the end of each and every shift, is it?
Wow, thank you for all your comments, everyone.
First of all, I’m only familiar with the Drug-Free Workplace rules in passing, since they’ve never applied anywhere I’ve worked in the past, and I seriously doubt they apply now.
Well, mainly because the job had a lot going for it - good boss, good money, interesting work. Sure, there’s a lot of other jobs, but this one would probably have been my top pick.
I’m skeptical. Is there any solid evidence that THC affects performance after the period of the initial high?
But even if it did, this is hardly comparable. I’m not a pilot; I’m a software engineer. I get to do things pilots can’t, like have a beer at my desk.
I’m sorry you think everyone who uses drugs recreationally is a ‘misfit.’ This is a belief more consistent with a DARE program or a Partnership for a Drug-Free America commercial than anything I’ve seen in the real world, where a large number of the best engineers I’ve worked with have also been recreational marijuana users. And if a company doesn’t want to hire them, that’s plain irrational.
I think this really summed it up:
A stand? It’s not a stand. It’s an unwillingness to subject myself to an intrusive invasion of my privacy. In fact, it’s a flat refusal to do so. Nobody, but nobody is going to tell me they are going to watch while I take my dick out and piss in a cup, so they can satisfy their unfounded paranoia. The mere thought is absolutely intolerable. I’m a professional, I hold a master’s degree in a technical field, and I have a superb resume. If they want me to piss in a cup for them, I will simply find someplace else to work. Fuck them.
I disagree. Taking the job demonstrates that however you say you feel, when push comes to shove you’ll cave.
Not taking the job, if it burns them often enough, will lead to an inferior group of employees.
It’s not likely to affect them, really.
And I’ll be frank: I don’t like the DFW. We didn’t want to institute it. But if someone were to send me a letter refusing a job offer because of it, I would shrug and consider myself better off for it. Not because I would assume the person was a druggie, but because I would assume the person had an inflated sense of self-worth that made him or her believe that I will change workplace policies in order to hire them. That’s the sort of employee I don’t need.
Intersting. You don’t need independent-thinking employees with a strong sense of personal dignity? That sounds like the kind of job I don’t need.
I don’t need employees who think that they are the exception to the rule. We have a reason for having drug tests. It’s not whimsical. If someone asked us why, we’d tell them. If the OP asked, he might get an answer similar to ours. “We can’t afford not to do it.”
We’ve had 2 raises for our employees since we’ve put this in place, money that we’ve saved by agreeing to a government mandate. If we hired the OP and did away with the DFW to please them, we’d have to take those raises away.
I am the exception to the rule. Unless I or my family were on the brink of homelessness, and I had absolutely no other choice (including flipping burgers,) I’d never agree to a drug test in a trillion years. It’s demeaning and an unreasonable breach of privacy.
There is one person on the face of this earth that has the right to ask that I take my cock out for their own purposes. Hint 1: it ain’t, and never will be, my boss. Hint 2: I’m married.
You can call BS on this, that’s fine. I don’t lie. This is a true account, and I’m sure it’s not an isolated frame of reference and logic to many recreational users. This is the logical step in their particular view. I personally think it’s stinkin’ thinkin’, but that’s my POV.