This whole thing about drug testing at work is insanity isn't it?

I work in a dangerous industry, a lot of quick decisions have to be made and if you don't choose the right way you and others and get seriously hurt or killed.

I could care less if the kid making my pizza is high but I don't want to die because the guy I'm working with is stoned and didn't do his job.

it's the dumbest class I've ever taken. 4 hours long that could be cut down to 20 minutes. So idealistic retired DEA guy trying to teach us about knowing the signs of someone how may be smoking LoL

 

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If we had regular testing it would weed out those that are irresponsible with their use of recreational drugs.
kind of like net fishing. who cares if a bunch of other life gets caught up in the net and dies. we got our fish.
by Voyage
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There is a way to do this and get the required results.
Announce sixty days in advance there is to be a drug test (for those that are obtuse, I am talking about a work environment that is strictly against being inebriated on the job whether for danger to life & equipment, or security reasons, or the like). This gives people a chance to:

a) Find work some other place.

b) Clean up (in other words, lay off it [reefer] until the tests are over). Afterwards, wait and see if policy "lightens up".

Honestly, people, anyone with fair warning well in advance who cannot comply (uhoh, I used a dirty word) is not deserving of the benefit of the doubt (as all doubt to their good sense is removed).

This plan is not about robbing you of your personal enjoyment, but fixing a real problem in many work places. Many of you bemoan this invasion of privacy. Granted, it is such, but necessitated by too many persons indulging to the point of endandering their coworkers [on a high risk work site]. Is your pleasure more important than another person's life?
I do eletrical work at heights of up to 100 feet. The work is highly dangerous with no room for foolishness or careless conduct.

 

Drugs impair judgment. When judgment is impaired accidents happen. You cannot honestly tell me that there is no correlation between drug use and impaired judgement.

 

that renders it even more pointless than it is now.
I'm sure that everyone agrees with the idea of safety at work and that drugs have no place there, especially high risk jobs.
Problem is that detection methods suck balls and the most often found substance is marijuana. The reason for that is because it takes so long for all the residual metabolites to be excreted from your body.
Hardly an accurate method to determine "on the job use" of drugs.
"Harder" drugs that can reek more havoc often have very low/brief detection times, so a person could be a complete crack head for 4-5 days a week and be clean by day 7 for a test.
Then we have a real big problem, they don't test for alcohol in a standard five panel test, yet alcohol is far and away the most abused substance in the workplace with the most potentially catastrophic results.

So you have the most benign substance being the one detected most frequently, and it's a substance that is legal with restrictions in many states and completely legal in two.
I think they are going to have to come up with a better strategy or remove marijuana from the list of tested default tested substance OR add alcohol to the list.

As I pointed out previously, workplace drug screening was/is a money making scheme concocted by the labs I mentioned.
If looked at rationally, there is no other real viable answer than it being a revenue generating machine, because the testing methods and resultant implementation are horribly flawed almost to the point of being a farce.

 

While I will not pretend to be a truly knowledgeable person when it comes to these sorts of matters I really doubt that most businesses would even consider changing their current methods for drug testing, man. I doubt that legalizing ganja would even bring us closer to achieving the desired effect.

 

So, how does one determine that a person cannot (or will not) comply?

Remove the benefit of the doubt beforehand in order to determine who can and cannot that's how. You've set up a classic catch-22. This is the quagmire of drug testing.

You can't tell me that the dude that goes on vacation to Hawaii and smokes a doobie once a year is a danger on the job whilst the alcoholic that drinks constantly when not on the job is not.

You can't say the guy that drinks like a fish from saturday morning till sunday night, goes to sleep, comes in to work on monday morning sober (because alcohol is cleansed from the body in less than 24 hours) is safer than the guy that had a bit of weed on friday night. (because weed takes 3 to 28 days to metabolize out of the body)

BTW JK, while on the surface your 60 day warning seems fair, in reality its an admission of failed policy. If an employer states up front as a condition of employment that you will be drug tested, then comply or get fired. Declaring amnesty, "y'all got 60 days to clean up" doesn't fix anything.

In reality the way it works (in so far as DOT mandated drug testing fields) if you come clean and tell your employer you've been doing drugs you are to be given a chance to clean up via an EAP. If you get caught in a random, you're gone. So you'd have a better chance of a "drug free workplace" if one simply told the work force everyone gets tested today, now, and if you have something to say first, speak up.

And of course, this all assumes that the current drug test protocol does catch pot smokers. I do hope you realize that the law does not allow for drug screeners to observe a person giving the sample in the case of pre-employment, random, or probable cause scenarios?

Which means that drug tests of people that are not convicted of a crime cheat the tests all the time.

The idea that everyone suffers in the name of catching one or two bad guys is at the root of this and so much else.

 

Okay; so I feel this lines up with a funny story. In my final year of high school - the entire school got piss tested. And the ENTIRE senior class tested positive for pot (despite the fact that we all didn't make "one wrong move" and fuck up our entire lives - in fact, I matriculated with 4 A's in Cambridge AS). The next day we all pitched up looking like this (unfortunately I don't have a photo of the whole group of us):


If stoners stand together, the man can't get us down. The issue seems to be that they don't - half of the people who call themselves hippies or are a bit deviant are sitting on the fence and seem to be unable to decide whether they should listen to the government or not. People - the government and the company you work for doesn't give a SHIT about your health or safety. They do, however, give a fuck about making money off of you. And they're scared that if you smoke a bit of blunt, you're going to realise that working 14 hours a day just to own a big house and a nice car is absolute bullshit.

I don't think anyone has the right to your piss. Even if drugs do inhibit your responses/reactions - shouldn't you rather be sacked because you incompetent, not because you do drugs? And if you ARE competent - shouldn't you be free from any consequences?

I'm a professional Equestrian athlete and I DO smoke pot (luckily generally when we get tested, it's the horses that get tested for anabolic steroids). If I can tell an 800kg ball of muscle what to do whilst stoned - I'm sure all of you can sit behind a desk stoned and not kill a bunch of people with your high-incompetency :2thumbsup::2thumbsup::2thumbsup:

 

Nor would I want to.

I don't have a problem with pre employment drug screens. As my sister (who owns a business that screens some employees) stated, they don't tell you if a person uses drugs. They tell you that if someone does use drugs, that they at least have their shit together enough to clean their system while looking for a job. If they can't manage to stay sober for a month then they probably either have a drug problem or they just don't give a shit. Either way they wouldn't be a desired employee. To your point, this doesn't do anything to target alcoholics but I what can we do about that? Whether right or wrong, alcohol is legal to use recreationally. Employers can't prohibit their employers from drinking off the job.

Drug screening in the case of an accident isn't fair to pot users because of the nature of the drug itself. If they can come up with a way to test if you're currently under the influence, or maybe if they only use field sobriety tests in this case to determine if the person's judgment was impaired at the time of the accident....then I wouldn't have a problem with it. Whether we like it or not, pot isn't legal to use recreationally. We can continue to try and change the laws but until that time it is a risk that myself and many others KNOWINGLY take.

Random drug screens is something I am completely against and I will never work for an employer who practices this.

 

This post is very naive and fails to consider any of the countless dangerous jobs where the risk of injury and/or death are actually present.

There are actually a lot of jobs out there where people don't sit on their ass behind a desk all day.

So far today I've done 4 things that placed myself in the position where one wrong move could have got me or my partner seriously hurt. Could I have done it safely while high on cannabis? Sure. And sometimes I do. But that doesn't mean everyone can.

 

If I owned a business I would be rather upset if someone came in freaking out on meth....

 

Legalizing marijuana would force a change in the drug screening because it would then fall under the same criteria as alcohol.
So they would either have to remove cannabis from the 5 panel or add alcohol.

 

Perhaps but at the same time one must take into consideration the negative stigma that has been placed upon weed by modern society. While alcohol has it's own vibe it normally isn't as negatively associated in peoples minds.

 

I guess you do live a sheltered life.
Attitudes are swinging quite dramatically from what I see.
Marijuana has become widely accepted as a benign and more safe substance than alcohol, and conversely alcohol is losing popularity and has most certainly become associated with a lot more negatives than positives in the general public's opinion.

 

oooh i disagree. people have seen alcoholism, i grew up with an abusive alcoholic mother, and in general i don't like when people get drunk and rowdy.

 

i used to test all kinds of drugs while at work

 

Sorry but I couldn't read past this statement.

 

My sister owns a business so I asked her about drug screening, and she said........

That better?

 

Freakin awesome you guys, awesome job!

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You misunderstand me. I am not talking of a sixty-day program on an ongoing basis, but as a one-time thing at my place of work for gleaning the chaff. I know the persons with whom I work and would only try it here as a cleansing process. I would not try it anywhere else (on this I must have been unclear; my apologies). Circulating the idea informally among my work associates, I have yet to run into someone who saw it as less than something that could possibly work. As to a failed drug policy, I was in the US Army in the '80s and that was a testimony to a failed policy.
No, there is no really good plan. But as stated earlier, at my place of employment, we have a serious and out of control drug problem. Our leadership is negligent in holding ALL persons accountable for preventable accidents that are repeatedly going on.
At least five persons have separately told me that at least fifty per cent (not twenty as I was guessing towards the top) or half of our workers are smoking it. When I found this to be incredulous, two of the persons said,
"you don't go to the parties. You do not know."
Quite a bit of this is shared with me because the maintenance personnel trust me (more than once I took responsibility for a mishap when I easily could have pinned it on someone else. That goes a long way). They also trust that I am not trying to bust their good time, but seek a workable solution to a problem that even they (many are users) concede is out of hand.

- JKHolman

 

Interesting.

That doesn't sound like a good scene. And truthfully the way you tell it, I don't know what would work. I'm curious though, let's say you have a pretty good idea who is smoking weed, who drinks alot, and perhaps some do alot of both. ( for the sake of simplicity im going to assume the only drug problem is alcohol and weed) Would you be able to recognize the ones that a dangerous due to getting high all the time vs people that are just not cut out for the work due to poor decision making, lack of attention, etc?
When one gets into performance analysis, there are many factors that can lead to inattention and bad attitude... divorce, a child having problems, that sort of thing. Your situation sounds pretty dangerous and I don't blame you for being concerned.
And while I can imagine that the workplace might be better if all the pot smokers were gone one day, you can't fire the alcohol users if they aren't drinking on the job.
Would a proactive approach by management/supervision, on a more individual face to face basis help to identify the people that shouldn't be on the job regardless of what they do on their off time?