In Oregon, smoking legally and responsibly. It’s time (long overdue) for us to speak up. [I personally can only tolerate tiny amounts, infrequently.]
The only time you should get fired for pot is if your job performance drops, and that drop can be incontrovertibly linked to your being too high to do your job (i.e. staring at the fish tank and giggling instead of reading the teleprompter) just like we do with alcohol…
How about if you rack up the company car because you’re high? Is that better than drunk, somehow?
I guess I’d personally file that under “job performance drops…”
NOPE NOPE AND FUCKING NO.
I work in industrial manufacturing and we build machines that build the things you see around you everyday. There is zero room for error when you are using a 20 ton crane to move parts that will easily crush someone if things went wrong. Or driving machines that weight over 50 ton in some what confined areas. Or getting a container off a 30 ft shelf with 10k lbs of hydraulic cylinders in it…
I’m all for legalizing pot. But until there is a test that can show, right here, right now you are high I’m okay working for a zero tolerance company. My life and the life of my coworkers is far more important than someone’s need to get high.
Does this company also have a zero tolerance policy for alcohol, opiate painkillers and cold medicine on the job? If so, I don’t think that falls outside the scope of my judgement… Edge cases, they’ll get yer rails and de 'em every time.
Then a company should have to apply for special dispensation to be a zero tolerance company by proving that it deals with situations like that; there are all sorts of jobs (like, oh, news anchor) where the opposite of your rule apply: “until there is a test that can show, right here, right now you are high” then zero tolerance is the idiotic and evil policy it is in most situations and testing should be considered uncalled for and unjustifiably invasive.
There’s this whole “lets prove what a serious business we are by instituting testing & zero-tolerance like those big boys over there” process by which the practice goes way, way outside the areas where it might conceivably be necessary, and well, fuck that.
Except, as far as we know, that’s not what happened here. 1) it was a minor fender bender; and b) as Mark says, the urine test she took doesn’t mean that she was high at the time, rather that she had used marijuana as far back as multiple weeks.
That aside - I’m curious if she was fired for the positive marijuana test implying that she was high when she got in the accident, or if her company has a zero tolerance policy on drugs in general? I watched the video, which doesn’t say, and don’t really want to visit her website from work to see if there’s more details there 
You need to relax, pal. Jesus.
My car got t-bone by a pot driver. Stupid kid almost killed my baby daughter sitting in the back seat. He was so high that he can barely hold a conversation. Had to call his mon&dad to talk to me. Drunk driver & pot driver => Not OK. They are killers on wheels. I drink just like everyone else, but I never get behind the wheel. Some people just never learns.
If you want safer roads, you should do everything you can to eliminate drunk drivers first. “Pot drivers” are much less likely than drunk drivers to crash their cars.
When recording information on drivers who had used marijuana, researchers only included those who specifically tested positive for THC, the main psychoactive cannabinoid in the plant associated with the “high” sensation.
…“Most psychoactive drugs are chemically complex molecules, whose absorption, action, and elimination from the body are difficult to predict, and considerable differences exist between individuals with regard to the rates with which these processes occur,” NHTSA writes. “Alcohol, in comparison, is more predictable.”
The trouble arises in the way the body processes marijuana – a person who has consumed the substance can potentially test positive for THC days after using. In a 2009 study published in the journal Addiction, six of 25 participants who had consumed marijuana still tested positive for active levels of THC seven days later – long after they had stopped feeling the effects of the cannabis.
So basically, the test involved people who tested positive but may well not have been under the influence at all - testing it is more problematic than with alcohol, and someone who uses marijuana every few days may test positive the whole time. This does not mean that it is safe, and suggesting that it is based on studies that admit to being almost useless is not helpful.
Edit: to clarify, I’m fully behind legalizing marijuana, but as a cyclist I’m a little more sensitive to people making excuses for distractions while driving.
Standard disclaimer for me in these conversations: I neither drink nor use pot, etc.
As I’m sitting here watching this video, I can’t help but think how normalized alcohol use is in our society. I’m farther outside of mainstream society for not drinking alcohol than those how carry on with lengthy workplace appropriate conversations about how drunk they were over the weekend. Maybe it’s just because I’m an outsider for both of these substances, but I really don’t see any major differences in the two.
(OK, actually I do see a difference. Which still leaves me baffled as to the legal differences.)
Pot was used by all them uppity negro types and all the good ol cracker boys were happy with their moonshine. Well that is the sum it all up with lack of tact reason.
Mind you my only experience with weed was long ago when I went to see Pink Floyd, at an indoor arena. I got a nice buzz just from breathing and it was quite a nice happy feeling so I can see why people partake. Sadly it didn’t last past the intermission.
So you get fired when your kid goes missing, when your debts exceed a certain value (tailored to your circumstances that you mutually agreed when you signed your contract of employment), when you’re thinking about a joke you heard last night, when you bend down to scratch an itch?
It takes only a moment’s distraction to let an accident at work sneak past you.
Such a test does exist, or one that’s much closer, anyway. The test that is almost universally used for drug testing tests for physiologically inactive metabolites that can remain in your body for weeks.
There is also a test for the active ingredient, which is still fairly conservative, in that it can detect it up to 12 hours after ingestion.
I should also point out that there are tests for alcohol that can detect use during the past several days.
The fact that, universally, they use the first kind of test for weed, and the second kind for alcohol, despite both types being available for both drugs, makes it abundantly clear that testing for weed is about enforcing ideological conformity, not about workplace safety.
To be fair, the reason they use the first kind of test for weed is because it can detect marijuana weeks after use. It’ll take some time for those states where pot is now legal to shift their mindsets and practices over to recognising that being intoxicated is now the crime, not just having been stoned at some point in the past.
I used to work for someone who used cannabis for his MS (and to get really, really fucking high, not that he’d admit it), and the amount I inhaled passively would have me utterly shafted on a drug test.
I realised after writing what I did that it could be read as saying something like “you aren’t safe to drive if you have enough THC in your body to register on a test”, which is why I made the subsequent edits. I lived with a guy who basically smoked the whole time he wasn’t working - we were teaching in China, so that was most of the time. He often wouldn’t wipe the board after teaching adults, so it was interesting to guess what he’d been talking about (apparently it was generally some kind of rambling monologue that encompassed international politics, maps of the UK, popular movies and so on, with very little cohesion). He kept a pretty large supply for himself and the rest of the teaching staff in the secret location of the top drawer of his bedside cabinet. I never actually tried any aside from one time that he gave me a baggie to make some brownies, but you could tell that it was affecting his judgement.
I trust someone like this woman to be sensible and I’m well aware that THC levels are an unreliable measure of impairment, but I don’t think that sending the message that cannabis has basically no effect on your ability to handle machinery is reasonable. As far as eliminating drunk driving goes, I don’t see why saying that cannabis can impair your driving ability should mean that alcohol’s effect is ignored.
