I always find these articles bizarre, personally. I don’t do drugs, but I’d never even consider a job that required drug testing for any price. If a company decided to institute it after the fact, I’d just walk off the job.
The fact that as a society we tolerate this stuff is bizarre to me. I mean, I understand that our system is built around destroying the ability of the individual to have any agency at all, to force people into taking any job no matter how onerous… but really. Late stage capitalism.
Not only is it no business of the company’s whether you do legal drugs in your off time, it’s no business if you do illegal drugs either. They have no right to your preciousssss bodily fluids at all.
It’s nice that you completely glaze over my occupational hazards. If I fuck up at work people can be seriously hurt, not to mention that ability to do thousands of dollars worth of damage. Besides your sobriety test just opens a pandora’s box of issues. Are you going to make it hard enough a functional alcoholic could pass or are we going to incorporate some reaction time tests in there? But then what if you have someone that just has poor coordination? Aren’t you entering into an area of discrimination based on their physical capabilities, especially so since they are already employed? From that, standpoint passing the sobriety test should be a requirement before the job offer, but I’m sure you’ll tell me that’s a bullshit idea as well. And yes the company I work for does have a physical capability requirement before a job offer is given. There is no point in hiring someone if they can not perform their job duties.
The last time I checked tobacco doesn’t greatly affect your reaction time or awareness. Your same analogy could be used for caffeine, but if anything it heightens your awareness.
At the end of the day I’m glad my company tests like it does, because that means there is one more layer of safety in the factory and better odds for all of us to go home to our families.
Good grief… you’d think the greater message would be clear as crystal: it’s time for companies to drop drug testing and actually do a better job screening, evaluating, and supporting workers. It is nobody’s business, outside of true public safety concerns, what I do or how I live my life when I am not working. It is an invasion of one’s privacy and the right to autonomy.
Pretty much all drug testing does is discriminate against traditionally excluded groups. And make a lot of wealthy people even wealthier - and they ain’t the workers.
In CO at least, crossing state lines is not a requirement for being unfairly disadvantaged. Dish Network, a Colorado company, fought and won in state courts a case establishing their right to test and fire a disabled employee for the marijuana he used legally, under prescription, off company time, for pain management.
At least in Canada, substance addictions are protected grounds for dismassal. If you hired someone who either has or has developed a drug addiction while employed, you need to find ways to address the addiction before you can legally terminate employment.
In the thumbnail image I had hoped that I saw two pints of beer. Once I zoomed in I can’t decide if it is Bud Ice or human urine, and a taste test won’t help either if they are both room temperature.
There’s very little reason to cross that state line. I passed on a good opportunity for work to avoid dealing with their nonsense. Too many brown friends who would be hesitant to visit me. Moronic weed laws, and a culture that is the societal equivalent of a bucket of stale urine.
Bit of a broad brush there. Some parts of the State are almost civilized (notably the Navajo, Apache, and assorted other tribal section. Plus Tucson.) I was born there and spent 60 years after in Arizona, and it was a good place to grow up. Admittedly that was before the massive influx of people fleeing civilization after 1960. Still, it was a good place to make a living and raise a family.
I will note, however, that I’ve since moved to NM, one of the kids is now in California, and another in Montana. The third is wrapping up his PhD before leaving for, perhaps, NM. Make of that whatever.
If a company makes every employee pee in a cup, they are probably a lot better positioned against claims of discrimination than if they tried to implement some sort of on-the-jobsite impairment test when an employee appears to be “acting funny”.
Liked for the “safety meetings” term… that’s our usual call to toke.
On topic: we need to change to impairment testing, not drug testing. A long time ago (these details are sketchy, and I can’t find the link right now), when the Palm Pilot was the device to own, a UK(?) university(?) developed an app that tested for reaction time, tracking an object, etc. Intended to be used as/instead of/in addition to the road-side tests currently employed (walk the line, blindly touching fingers to nose, etc). Should be more doable today.
There’s too much focus on what is causing the impairment. If you’re impaired, you shouldn’t be driving, regardless of what’s the reason. Cannabis, alcohol, other illegal drugs, legal prescription drugs, lack of sleep, in a rage over the wife cheating on you, etc. all can impair driving ability.
I think the focus on identifying the specific drug is mostly a desire to shame the perpetrator. I just don’t get the need to know why you can’t focus on the task at hand. It’s the inability to focus and safely operate your car/machine/tools that matters.
This. A friend of a friend used to be able to do their office job competently while also being a heroin addict. People were shocked when they said that they were going into rehab as it hadn’t occurred to anyone that someone like that could be an addict.
That’s a 5 panel urine test. You can buy them in bulk for less then a dollar each and they’re notorious for both false positive and false negatives. Making a decision based on one of those is little better than flipping a coin.
Looks like the Georgia nursing board is on the same page.
Tl,dr? -
The nurse was seen on duty at the hospital with red, dilated eyes, her speech slurred, her behavior drowsy. Trusted to care for people at their most vulnerable and fragile, instead she had taken opioids intended for patients and injected herself.
Without a doctor’s OK, another nurse ordered Demerol and Benadryl for an emergency room patient, but that patient had already been discharged. Later, he found work in the hospital at Georgia State Prison, where he pilfered those same drugs and worked while he was impaired.
Yet another nurse went to work at a hospital so intoxicated she couldn’t operate a computer or an elevator, then she gave a patient the wrong medication.
All three are still on the job. So are most Georgia nurses ensnared in the opioid epidemic, even those who showed up at work stumbling, tampered with syringes to get a fix, or falsified patient records to cover up their addiction.
But the public can’t know who all the addicted nurses are, what they did, or the extent of what some call a crisis, because of the way the state’s regulatory board for nurses is operating, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found.
The Board of Nursing handles more than half of its disciplinary cases secretly, and it doesn’t keep statistics that would show how many nurses are addicted or how many relapse.So when a registered nurse from LaGrange displayed “strange behavior” at work — and her supervisors found patients hadn’t received their medications 27 times — the board issued a confidential order. It came to light only after the opioid-addicted nurse failed to comply and had her license suspended.
Other nurses have been granted second, third and even fourth chances when they relapsed, the AJC found.
The board put a Forsyth nurse on probation in 2002 for chemical dependence, again in 2013 after she was fired for diverting morphine, and again in 2017, after yet another relapse.
Exactly so. There’s been a whole shitshow recently about sleep apnea suffering train drivers who were at least as impaired as substance abusers.
But the fact is the most people getting drug tested are not at jobs where they physically risk other people. Impairment testing sounds great, but I’m trying to imagine how big brotherish it could be in reality. Picture randomly getting an alert on your phone demanding that you immediately use the Sober-ific app and prove that you are unimpaired, with face recognition enabled so you can’t hand it off to a buddy.
In my 30 plus years of managing plants, I have never discharged anyone for drug use / abuse. I paid for rehab on three occasions (all at the request of the employee) (Twice for the same guy - an 18 year employee who got caught up in crack). He eventually could not find it in himself to prevent it from taking over his life and I had to terminate his employment due to absenteeism.
People don’t want to admit addiction, and the do want to do a good job. A drug test is simply a way to try to find the cause of the problem and help the employee face his problem. If they can find a way to be addicted and still complete the tasks without incidents, they will never be tested in my employment.
BTW - I would never “flip a coin” to determine someone’s fate and your suggestion that I am ignorant of the consequences is bothersome to me.
