and no one irl even has the decency to agree with me because it’s so fucking drilled into the culture that these fucking BuNsInNesSes have a Right to do this because it’s a bSUsniEss. like oh yeah they have an office building so they definitely get to analyze my piss because they say they want to. sick fucking freaks.
preaching to the choir a bit on lemmy (or i would hope so at least) but still
My company does not do drug tests and never has. Someone asked the owner why and he said ‘Id lose a lot of good people’
Sounds like you work for a good company, at least with respect to drug testing.
They’re good people who take good care of me.
This is what companies used to be like and why people worked at a job for 40+ years
I worked for one place like that. I worked in another place, in the same industry, where they decided to drug test all their employees one day. They lost everyone from 3rd shift, and everyone from 2nd shift except my supervisor and myself.
After that, they rapidly started to lose customers…
Did they really expect 3rd shift people to be clean lol
My current job and a different job I had, didn’t drug test people. Current job has a few stoners at the upper levels so they just don’t test people. The other company was very small, was mostly developers, and had a high bar for getting an interview, so they knew that also going “also you have to be clean” wasn’t a good idea to do to developers especially after recreational pot became legal.
Honestly I’ve seen a lot less dev jobs do drug testing since it whittles down too many otherwise perfectly competent employees.
I work in consulting so we often have to follow the rules that our clients impose on us. I once did IT work for a large utility company, who tested all of their employees since they have people operating heavy machinery and working in dangerous situations. One of the people that failed the test was the Client Engagement Lead (the highest ranked person on our project). Fortunately the client realized that IT workers don’t need to be held to the same standards as someone operating dangerous equipment and allowed them to retake the test.
Most recently, one of our clients thought we were drug testing our consultants but then realized we weren’t. So they told us we’d have to all get tested, even though many of us had been working for them for years. They, smartly, gave us a 3 week notice of when the testing would be.
That’s an American thing.
This. In Canada, most drug testing is considered a violation of rights and freedoms because your employer should not have a say in how you live your life. There are exceptions for high risk jobs where an impaired worker could cause death by negligence.
Bingo. If my boss asked for my piss I’d go straight to HR. Americans put up with so much insane stuff when it comes to work.
Which is crazy when you think about all the people that migrate to the US for jobs/opportunity. Makes you wonder how bad it is in other places.
In some cases it is, yes, worse. But in many cases it’s just the press the Americans spew about themselves living in the “land of the free” while the jackboots march in unison ever closer.
I can understand the high risk jobs one and think that’s fair. In the town I grew up in some factories would do drug test as a way to fire people with cause instead of having layoffs. A few were more seasonal work, so once seasons changed and demand dropped then more drug testing started.
It’s also an insurance thing. Drug testing programs are expensive, but the insurance companies incentivize it with huge discounts. It turns out that people who don’t do drugs are less accident prone and are usually a bit healthier too. This explains why US hospitals frequently test for tobacco use. It has nothing to do with the legality of use. This is why even with weed getting legalized many companies will still test for it.
People who do drugs are less accident prone?
Dammit. Fixed. Thanks!
And insurance is also the reason that you will have to pee for workman’s comp claims regardless of whether or not your company has a testing policy.
Thry test for tobacco use at hospitals?
You mean they test patients? Or employees?
As a smoker I’ve never heard of this. Also it’s legal so why not just admit to it?
deleted by creator
They test employees. It’s often hospital policy that their employees do not smoke, and while I’m sure they dont like the look of nurses and doctors smoking on hospital grounds, its really that the hospital gets a big discount on employee health insurance.
Weird. Most of the paramedics and EMTs I know smoke. Of course they are not actual hospital employees.
It’s also a getting federal money thing. Lots of grants or federal funds provided require drug tests, or having been tested.
deleted by creator
I would love to see the correlation between alcoholism and accidents. Bet that crowd is way more accident prone.
I guess, only the Us of America even.
which is funny because it was brought up in Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives and they found that drug tests were against the 4th amendment.
It specifically found the opposite in safety-sensitive positions.
Thanks Reagan. Fun fact, in the mid 80’s Reagan’s administration did a big study to show how effective drug testing in the workplace was, and how much it raised productivity. When they got the results back, it found productivity had dropped, and workplace safety hadn’t changed. The results said the program was a complete failure. They tried to bury the report and not release it. Rolling Stone magazine sued the government to get a copy, since it was made with public money, and won. They were the only media outlet to publish the results.
Happen to have a link? That sounds interesting but my Google fu is weak today and couldn’t find it.
Source ChatGPT Web Scan:
The claim about the Reagan administration conducting a study in the mid-1980s to demonstrate the effectiveness of workplace drug testing, and then trying to bury its negative results, is not supported by the available historical records.
The Reagan administration’s drug policies in the 1980s, particularly under the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, focused primarily on increasing penalties for drug possession, creating minimum sentences for drug-related offenses, and addressing the crack cocaine epidemic. These policies were criticized for creating a racial and class imbalance in drug-related punishments and for being ineffective in addressing the systemic causes of drug abuse [❞] [❞] [❞] [❞].
Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, which began in the early 1980s, aimed to spread awareness of the dangers of drug use, especially among youth. However, this campaign was criticized for oversimplifying the solution to drug abuse and for being largely ineffective in preventing adolescent drug use [❞].
There is no information available in the sources reviewed about a specific study on workplace drug testing being conducted and its results being suppressed by the Reagan administration, nor about Rolling Stone magazine suing the government for its release. The focus of the Reagan administration’s drug policies seemed more oriented towards legislative measures and public awareness campaigns rather than workplace drug testing studies.
Except in military environments (which I think correlate to environments where heavy equipment is in use). https://prhome.defense.gov/Portals/52/Documents/RFM/Readiness/DDRP/docs/72208/DoD Drug Policy History.pdf
You know it’s all bullshit because they don’t/can’t test for alcohol dependence, which is way more devastating to a person’s productivity than cannabis.
I have never been given a breathalyzer at work, either for pre-employment or post-accident.
I do vividly recall being drug tested for hitting a support column with a forklift. I passed. The next day, someone else hit the same post. He smelled like a bar mat. No test for him.
My job breathalyzed me in addition to the piss test. I asked the attendant about the breathalyzer test, and she said that it’s common for people to fail it.
I recently learned that in NZ they will give you a breathalyzer test if you’ve done something such as have a vehicular collision or been speeding at something like 140 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. Even if you’re a cop on highway patrol duty; you get in a crash, another cop has to administer the test.
Hard drugs also don’t show up on a drug test nearly as long as weed does, so you’re really only stopping people who smoked in the last month, while others are doing whatever.
And add to that the fact that a test for THC isn’t able to tell if someone is high right then. The tests only check for the metabolites of THC, not THC itself.
Damn, América really is crazy. I wouldn’t accept such tests and I’ve never even tried drugs.
Depends what your job was. If you’re my 747 pilot I would be outraged if you refused a drugs test when asked.
There’s a time and a place for regulated drugs tests.
Here is one guy who should’ve been drug tested before doing any work. “Several of his friends recalled him going to work after a night of doing drugs, with one of them saying he would never allow Duntsch to operate on him.”
deleted by creator
It really depends on the position and what they’re testing for. Do you really want a heavy machinery operator to be a cokehead or heroin addict? There is a real risk of them killing someone. Testing someone in a job like IT for smoking weed? That’s a different story.
Also a lot of the time they only test you post-hiring if you fucked up somehow.
It can definitely be used against people (usually the disenfranchised) though to prevent them being hired or to get them fired.
The place I work will fire you on the spot if you test positive for marijuana. Marijuana is legal in this state. If I smoke on the weekend, and then test positive on Wednesday, I lose my job.
However, if I get ripple-dee-doo-dah shit-faced Tuesday night, come in on Wednesday miserably hung over, I’ll pass that piss test. And still be more impaired than I would be from that joint I had Saturday night.
As a long time stoner, I agree that we are targeted more than nonusers simply because THC hangs out in the body a lot longer than other drugs. It would take me months to piss clean just so I could get a job at something like Family Dollar. It doesn’t matter if I was a drunk or did an 8 ball of coke a few days ago because that wouldn’t show up in a drug test.
Just because a drug is legal doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tested for in scenarios where that is applicable. Many jobs do in fact test for alcohol.
I wouldn’t want my bus driver under the influence of anything (preferably not even sleep deprivation), but honestly couldn’t give less of a shit if the cashier was high out of their mind, so long as they do their job. Some jobs are more gray area. For instance, a chef or fast food worker fucking up could mean someone dying from anaphylactic shock.
Yeah but the half life for alcohol is way shorter than weed.
Ya if a worker fucking up can directly result in someone dying, I’m not opposed to testing for hard drugs. They also only stay in your system for a few days so if someone can’t pass that, then you can probably find a better fit
I said this elsewhere in the thread- unless you are also giving random breathalyzers, this is a ridiculous and hypocritical policy because lots of people drink before going to work. And they’d be drunk right then and there, not at some unspecified point before the test was taken.
Many desk jobs would probably be reasonable to have testing on as well. People don’t realize how critical software is today. That same piece of heavy machinery has a cpu with thousands of lines of code sitting between the operator and the actual machinery.
Wow you are exactly what he is complaining about. It’s not like the guy is coding live and each keystroke goes directly to the machine. What risk is it to people if a couple years ago one of the guys typing keys that would later get tested like crazy was high?
Cheese theory. You want as many layers of protection between creation and execution. Bugs will inevitably slip through tests, and reducing the number that are created before testing will inherently reduce the number that slip through. In some fields preventing just one bug might save many lives.
I would not limit it to coders however - a lawyer screwing up their defense, a coked up billion dollar CEO disregarding the wider effects of a major decision, an insurance agent making a wrong decision etc. etc.
The irony is that people higher up in the chain of command, whose decisions affect far more people, often slip by without being tested whilst the bottom-feeder who gets fired after a fuckup that affects a single person is hounded to the ends of the earth.
I work in IT and about half the workforce smokes weed. I worked at a high frequency stock trading firm in NYC that made hundreds of millions of dollars per year and tons of the developers were high during work hours. We had quarterly open bar parties where the CEO himself would openly smoke weed.
Being high on THC doesn’t have the same effect on someone that is drunk, all coked up, or doped up on opiates. Smoking weed tends to open up people’s creative sides and it reduces stress and anxiety when something isn’t working the way you want it to. The same can’t be said for the others because they impair your ability to focus, your vision, and decision making.
Also as someone else said, there are only a few positions where being high as hell can seriously impact the company. Most of the time the stuff you do doesn’t have that much of an impact on the company in general.
Imagine thinking “my employees are performing great but maybe I should check their pee to be sure”
That’s the thing though. It’s never that. It’s more like
Sure my employees are doing fine, but maybe I can squeeze some more profit out of them if I make sure they aren’t enjoying themselves whatsoever
It’s our insurance gives us cheaper rates if we drug test, and we can fire you if you get hurt on the job and happened to smoke a joint last weekend.
Surely, it was the joint of marijuana weed last week that caused the accident! /S
It’s more like “These fucking insurance crooks will drop my company if I don’t drug test my employees even though it’s a waste of time and money and an invasion of privacy.”
Why does it have to be the employees doing great or fine?
Some of my employees aren’t performing well or are assholes, but I don’t have enough grounds to fire them yet.
Not that a drug test would be the best way to solve that… but it seems like a plausible thought process.
They can’t do this in Europe unless it’s actually dangerous for the job, medical professional, operating heavy industrial machinery, cop etc. It’s just because the US has no worker rights laws.
You don’t want someone who is still high driving a train, but it’s probably fine if all I need to do is off work.
I’ve also never heard anyone get tested more than once and you can take the test when you want. If you can’t produce clean piss once in your life, then you might have a problem.
Those are generally the same industries performing the drug tests in the US, too. They only test if they’re required to by OSHA, DOT, or insurance due to the nature of the work (i.e. “safety sensitive” roles). I’ve never done a drug test for an office job or basic labor; but I get regularly tested for my DOT related job.
Meanwhile I’ve been tested in order to work at Walmart and Jiffy Lube when I was younger.
Walmart and jiffy lube both have heavy equipment
Walmart had a forklift that was only used by certain certified individuals but jiffy lube had no heavy equipment.
Didn’t have a lift?
Point is, they both can have stuff, regardless of if you are the dude to operate it
No there was no lift or any other heavy equipment or machinery. We had a floor jack and hand tools. I find the idea that US employers drug test primarily for OSHA compliance or due to heavy equipment quite absurd. It’s about discrimination (for both the right and wrong reasons) plain and simple.
Discrimination against who?
In Canada (and I think in most of the world) it’s illegal to randomly test employees unless you have reasonable cause.
Testing of an individual employee may be allowed in specific cases where there is reasonable cause to believe the employee is impaired by drugs or alcohol while on duty or is unable to work safely due to impairment from alcohol or drugs.
Pre-hire and pre-site-access are both still legal though
My biggest fear is failing one when I haven’t taken anything. I never have, but I know people who have. I’ve also known people who have passed after getting totally blitzed the night before. They are wildly inaccurate, aside from being an invasion of privacy.
I read, when you eat stuff with poppy seeds, some tests are false positive, because the plants are closely related.
Not closely related, Opium is made from the same plant as poppy seeds, the plant is aptly named the opium poppy. (This is the cash crop of afghanistan, which supplies 80% of the worlds opiate demand as of 2021, down from 90% in 2011, but currently in the rise again.) Old info see comment below
The seeds dont have opiates in them, but the fluid in the seed pod (or something like that) does so the seeds are typically contaminated with opiates.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Opium_cultivation_Afghanistan_2022.pdf
That info is outdated; the Taliban have heavily cracked down on opium cultivation to the extent that their total crop yield saw a “95% decline from 6,200 tons produced in 2022 to 333 tons in 2023”.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_opium_survey_2023.pdf
I did not know that, thank you for the link. That graph of production looks like my stock portfolio lol.
I remember in the 2000s reading that production soared after we invaded and kicked the taliban back. Wonder how this will impact the heroin epidemic.
It’s an interesting question! My understanding is that it may affect opiates like heroin, but not opioids (fentanyl, oxycodone, novacaine etc) as opiates are naturally derived whereas opioids are synthetic.
This opinion piece from Chatham House says before 2023, Afghanistan was responsible for over 80% of global opium supply, so I’d say the impact on the heroin market will be significant to say the least.
In my armchair opinion, I think we’re likely to see opioids like fentanyl fill that gap. That scares me a lot given the relative strengths at identical concentrations of heroin and fentanyl vary so wildly.
opiates.
You should see how they do it in the service industry. No tests to get the job, but if you’re ever hurt at work and entitled to workman’s comp they give you a test and if you’ve smoked weed anytime in the last month the presumption is that you were high at work and not only do they not have to pay you for your injury but they just flat-out fire you.
The worker’s comp drug tests are such a disgusting example of late stage capitalism.
Imagine that you made a lot of money and lived comfortably off of the hard work of others. Then when one of those others got hurt while making money for you, you go out of your way to make sure you don’t have to help them cover the medical costs. Also, you take their only source of income away from them so they couldn’t even cover it themselves if they wanted to.
I can’t imagine being that heartless, and its literally just standard pretty much everywhere in the US. It is very saddening.
This is the intersection of two elements of our culture:
-
everyone must always do everything they can to make as much money as possible regardless of the consequences
-
if someone uses drugs, they’re not a person anymore and it’s okay to hurt them as much as is within your power
-
Trying to think of someone who works in the service industry that doesn’t smoke weed…
Yeah, they’re never paying comp.
That’s exactly the point.
Never get between a grift industry and it’s profits.
It’s especially frustrating as someone who needs cannabis for severe anxiety, because it’s anxiety inducing in itself to have to hide it and that pretty much cancels out the benefits for me- it’s something we absolutely need to destigmatize at work especially.
Please try therapy. Anxiety is curable with therapy, whereas meds or cannabis are temporary symptom relief, but the symptoms will always come back as soon as you’re sober.
Lmfao. Anxiety is curable with therapy is not a rule. Some anxiety is curable with therapy, but not all of it.
For example?
I have Generalized anxiety disorder, It’s chronic and therapy doesn’t “cure” it. I will most likely struggle with it for the rest of my life. While this may be an anecdotal example I’m not aware of anything that “cures” anxiety disorders, therapy is mostly there to manage the symptoms effectively. Therapy helped me understand and somewhat mitigate the problem, but it’s not something I can ever be rid of, and that’s how it is for a lot of people who have an anxiety disorder.
Same, and funny enough, one of the things my therapist recommended to treat my anxiety more effectively is cannabis.
And just like that, the entire American medical system, as well as kittnpunk’s mental health, began to heal!
Psychotherapy is the single most evidence-based treatment for anxiety, the literature stands up across the world. Not sure why you’re bringing the American medical system into this, but while we’re on the topic, our medical system absolutely encourages people to seek solutions in substances. Kittnpunk is saying they’re so anxious that they cannot function without being high. Psychotherapy can 100% help them decrease their reliance on cannabis to feel less anxious
I am so glad my new job doesn’t test unless if there is an industrial accident or in very specific dangerous positions where it is warranted. Handbook basically says don’t show up to work fucked up. What you do on your own time is your business.
It is a huge breach of privacy, especially when you have to start disclosing legally prescribed medications that they test for. Why a company has a right to my body, my medical history, or any other private information is nuts.
The fact that there is a system, run by Equifax of course, where employers can choose to hand your work history, paystubs, and other information to and then other companies can then pay to get access to is also nuts. You can request to have it frozen, but who the hell even knows to do this? It is messed up.
OSHA and Workers Comp require a test to be done if it’s a workplace accident.
Exactly. We do industrial automation. I did the field life at my last job spending months at construction sites building these giant warehouses with conveyor and automation. New job is more focused on robotics, but plenty of conveyor too. It is a fun field and I highly encourage Software Engineers/Developers/etc to look more into doing Controls Engineering and work in this industry. It sounds boring on paper a lot of the time, but I have never been happier.
