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Workplace Drug Testing
Rderdall
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I continue to hear stories on the news of companies considering instating random drug testing to increase workplace safety and prevent drug related accidents. Every time this issue comes up, there's always the other side of the story represented by union heads and opposition that fight to prevent random drug testing.
I live in an area where Oil and Gas are major production operations, and many of the employees get paid a lot of money to do very labour intensive and dangerous work. There are hundreds of stories from people that have worked in the Oil and Gas field (many friends of mine) that describe the "work hard/play hard" mentality.
The story that I'd just heard this morning was that our City's transit system was considering having all new applicants for operator positions (train and bus) to pass a drug test.
If myself, or a family member worked at a dangerous job, I'd sure as hell want to know that my co-workers were of clean and sober mind. If I were on a bus or train, it'd be awful nice to know that the person driving was also clean and sober.
If random drug testing really is effective in stopping workplace accidents, and I would imagine also has the spinoff effect of increasing worker health and reliability, then why would people fight against a safer workplace?
I understand that from the employee side of things, what they do on their own time isn't of the company's concern. Additionally, if someone only smoked pot occasionally, there's very little risk in activity like that affecting their performance. The pot smokers aren't the people who concern me, but the people who do the more dangerous drugs. If you give a free pass to the pot smokers, you're essentially giving a free pass to all drugs.
Also, a sleep deprived employee is arguably MORE of a safety concern than someone who'd gotten high a couple of days ago. There's no way that a company can perform a random "sleep test" to make sure that their employees are all well rested.
I am not a drug user. I have nothing to fear if I was faced with taking a drug test. I would not feel like I was giving up any rights if I were asked to take a drug test. I do not disrespect anyone who IS a drug user.
I see workplace drug testing as a positive for a company when seen through the eyes of a business, but I also know that there is a lot of opposition against it.
Help me see the other side, and explain why drug testing is a bad thing.
I live in an area where Oil and Gas are major production operations, and many of the employees get paid a lot of money to do very labour intensive and dangerous work. There are hundreds of stories from people that have worked in the Oil and Gas field (many friends of mine) that describe the "work hard/play hard" mentality.
The story that I'd just heard this morning was that our City's transit system was considering having all new applicants for operator positions (train and bus) to pass a drug test.
If myself, or a family member worked at a dangerous job, I'd sure as hell want to know that my co-workers were of clean and sober mind. If I were on a bus or train, it'd be awful nice to know that the person driving was also clean and sober.
If random drug testing really is effective in stopping workplace accidents, and I would imagine also has the spinoff effect of increasing worker health and reliability, then why would people fight against a safer workplace?
I understand that from the employee side of things, what they do on their own time isn't of the company's concern. Additionally, if someone only smoked pot occasionally, there's very little risk in activity like that affecting their performance. The pot smokers aren't the people who concern me, but the people who do the more dangerous drugs. If you give a free pass to the pot smokers, you're essentially giving a free pass to all drugs.
Also, a sleep deprived employee is arguably MORE of a safety concern than someone who'd gotten high a couple of days ago. There's no way that a company can perform a random "sleep test" to make sure that their employees are all well rested.
I am not a drug user. I have nothing to fear if I was faced with taking a drug test. I would not feel like I was giving up any rights if I were asked to take a drug test. I do not disrespect anyone who IS a drug user.
I see workplace drug testing as a positive for a company when seen through the eyes of a business, but I also know that there is a lot of opposition against it.
Help me see the other side, and explain why drug testing is a bad thing.
Xbox Gamertag: GAMB1NO325Xi
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Beyond that, drug testing is a cheap and dirty industry full of minimum wage employees, scam artist owners, false positives (plus false negatives) and aging technology/equipment. It's pretty much what you'd expect if a political panic campaign convinced tens of thousands of employers that they need to drug test their minimum wage employees.
So, you get a low-paid temp at Gov. Rick Scott's wife's ScamCo half-assedley testing your airplane's pilot alongside ten thousand potential McBurger Makers. You aren't any safer, your burgers aren't any better, but the politically connected owners of ScamCo got richer, so it's all good.
Also, I'm in Canada, and have no idea who Rick Scott is (other than what I just Wikipedia'd), and I'm not necessarily worried about minimum wage workers making hamburgers. The instances I'm referring to are jobs where you're getting paid a lot of money to do a job that requires near perfect execution. The Oil Field workers get paid over$40-$50/hr to operate very dangerous equipment, and if they make any mistake, it could lead to serious injuries for both themselves and those working around them.
But it does lend to the politics in the testing industry though, that it becomes an excuse to get rid of employees that may not have been so easy to get rid of. I can certainly see a minimum wage employee getting canned because of a false test result, and having no means to fight it.
Xbox Gamertag: GAMB1NO325Xi
Well that's the thing, I very much doubt it's effective. Other than alcohol drugs generally don't have much of an effect on your cognitive abilities after the effects wear off. If I got high yesterday I would be as capable of doing things as I were if I hadn't (assuming I had enough sleep). There is little reason to assume drug testing will reduce workplace accidents and the data seems to bear that out.
Now it is true that drug use on the job affects performance, though nothing impairs so much as alcohol, but the fact is that drug tests don't measure current impairment. They look for drug metabolites, stuff that shows up hours or days later and remains. If I had smoked some weed last Saturday it would show up in my test today, however if I hadn't but instead got high as a kite an hour before the test I would pass it easily.
Well the point is that they will likely use the same test on the hamburger makers as on the dangerous equipment workers. The drug testing industry is just not something you should trust to do a good job.
If one is responsible with one's use of chemicals such that work performance is not affected, then why do you need to test for drugs? You have a productive employee.
The only actual consequences of drug use that affect an employer on a worker's time off the clock are caused by the failed War on Drugs anyway.
EDIT: Beaten by HamHamJ
I'm also not opposed to 'for cause' drug testing - such as when a person is visibly impaired, or causes a workplace accident / injury. I'd argue that testing would need to be relevant to job performance / legitimate safety concerns and again, employed consistently by policy.
Randomized drug testing is a bit of a mixed bag. If the randomization is employed consistently across the organization (i.e. the kid in the mailroom or the CEO is equally likely to get called) I have a bit of a 'meh' attitude.
The main opposition I've seen though - and the reason I've seen union opposition - is that it's not employed consistently across the organization. Instead, it's used in a harassing or punitive manner, and often targeted at particular individuals. In a lot of cases there is little to no recourse offered for an employee who is terminated due to a failed drug test, even when the test may be a false positive or something that in no way affects the job.
Overall, I would say drug testing - in theory - isn't a necessarily bad thing, but due to the way the tests currently work, and the way they are currently implemented, I'm not a big supporter. A person who smoked pot a week ago at the beginning of their vacation shouldn't risk termination from their job in a call center. Now, if the testing was precise enough to tell if they smoked the bowl on their lunch, or they dropped a pallet off their hi-lo, that's a different circumstance. It's just hard to craft policy that can properly address both situations.
Fair competition is a different beast. Testing should absolutely be a requirement in sports participation.
It reminds me of the joke in Futurama though:
However, your problem is assuming that drug-testing = guaranteeing sober and alert.
Sober and alert includes sleeping well, not drinking alcohol, avoiding distractions such as cell phones or music. None of those things are tested for. Except alcohol, in the extreme case where you show up for work drunk, but just having a beer or two before work won't get you into trouble despite demonstrably affecting your mental alertness. Meanwhile, drug testing will catch you if you smoked weed a week ago. Which has exactly no effect whatsoever on sober and alert. Random drug testing is looking for the wrong thing, it is not accomplishing your goal of insuring sober and alert workers in key positions.
That's not counting, as someone pointed out, that harder and more dangerous drugs metabolize through your system more quickly and are harder to detect, and that a lot of those tests are political scams ridden with false-positives, and that they open the door to arbitrary employer abuses. So not only is the approach not sound theoretically, it is usually a disaster when implemented practically.
I would never have sought out this job but it found me. I have personal opinions about this industry but don't let those get in the way of my work. When I get home, I think I will spill a lot of information here to help people understand some of the inner workings of these things.
I won't go into the corporate side of things because I don't interact with those fellows. I spend most of my time getting results overturned.
It is true though, many drugs metabolize very quickly and because of that, they will often not be caught by a random screen. Marijuana will get you every time though. That stuff sticks around for a loooong time.
There's no evidence that random drug testing improves workplace safety.
In the vast majority of drug-related occupational accidents, the drug involved is alcohol, which is not typically tested for.
Fatigue is a far more common source of impairment than drug use.
If you actually want to reduce workplace accidents, then perform random attention or hand-eye coordination tests.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This topic specifically is in regards to workplace recreational drugs, but I am in agreeance with Josh in both of his statements. Getting into that subject would certainly derail this conversation.
Not necessarily, but I 100% believe that alcohol is a very dangerous drug and shouldn't be taken less seriously than others. However, it is not a criminal offence to be in possession of alcohol (unless you're drinking it in a car).
This is also a valid argument. I agree that actual performance and safety need to be carefully measured. From a business standpoint, this becomes incredibly expensive having somebody to 24/7 monitor workplace procedures. It is much more cost effective to hire a short term testing firm. (If drug testing actually works)
I can see true value in this. Typically, a workplace incident would be handled with a written case, and filed away. If the same employee has been in multiple incidents, then termination would result. I assume that most companies don't enforce a "one strike, you're out" policy. However, if a test proves that you were intoxicated at the time of the incident, then immediate termination would result.
Xbox Gamertag: GAMB1NO325Xi
The problem with your assertion here is that it ignores false positives. Here's a helpful list (table 3) http://dig.pharm.uic.edu/faq/2011/Feb/faq1.aspx
In the case of prescription drugs, if you notified your employer before taking a drug test and provided them the prescription from your doctor, they might be understanding of a false positive. In the event it's an over-the-counter drug or other substance (poppy seed muffin) from that list you're likely out of luck -- and out of a job.
Not all drugs are the same yet our popular categories ("hard" drugs vs "soft" drugs vs legal drugs) and legal categories (control schedules, etc) are based on all sorts of outmoded ideas that were obsolete decades ago. So we end up talking about "drugs" as some big monolithic category when they're not, or we talk about drugs using whatever bullshit category somebody brings up.
Drug arguments are rife with mediocre statistics, workplace performance arguments are rife with mediocre statistics, put the two together and you have a big ball of derp.
Ultimately nothing ever changes unless a law is passed (SF has a law against random drug testing in non-safety-critical positions, like being a Walmart cashier) because employment is at-will and shitty off-the-shelf drug tests are cheap if you buy them in bulk.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
"It says here you're on painkillers"
"Yes, they're prescribed"
"Mmm-hrmm..."
In many cases it's not a criminal offense to be in possession of (personal quantities / medicinal) marijuana either. There are circumstances where being in possession or consuming alcohol is illegal (as you pointed out, in a car).
This argument doesn't hold up - if I were to go to Amsterdam or Boulder and get high, then fly home to work, I'm not doing anything illegal. If I am 18 years old and drinking alcohol, I am breaking the law.
The big issue I see with marijuana is that it's difficult for the basic tests to determine when / how much marijuana someone smoked. A person could smoke weed a week ago, but still fail a drug test. You run into some complications with prescription drugs / their abuse as well.
I'm not a big fan of 'one strike' policies. They usually aren't enforced consistently, simply because many employers are aware of the disruption that job loss causes for an individual and their family. This leads to many cases where impairment / cause is overlooked by a manager for employees they like, while it's used in a punitive / discriminatory manner for employees they don't like.
Lack of an appeal process, unreliable testing, inconsistent application - all of that adds up.
There's also the issues of addiction being a medical / mental health issue, and I hate the idea of someone losing their job due to a disability without any opportunity to address it.
You also can't dismiss the fact that a workplace incident is often random happenstance. A person could happen to be impaired (or not be impaired but fail a drug test) but that had no bearing on the incident. Or that a person's impairment not causing an incident was merely luck. I'm not sure how I feel about there being a different standard for impairment causing an incident and simple impairment.
This is another problem with drug testing.
In terms of detection rates, the most common is marijuana. Just behind that is opioids.
Opioid tests do not (and largely cannot, for nerdy biological reasons) discriminate between different opioids: heroin, methadone, morphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and hydromorphone all breakdown into different mixtures of the same metabolites. Some drug-testing companies claim they can tell the difference between heroin and morphine. They're lying.
Some opioid addicts doctor-shop or go to pill-pushing doctors to feed their addiction, and therefore have a prescription. Having a legal prescription for opioids does not mean you're actually taking them for a bona fide medical complaint, nor does it mean you're not an addict.
Similarly, an individual taking opioids for a legitimate medical complain may not suffer any impairment at all. The ability of the human body to process opioids without leading to mental impairment after you've been using opioids for a while is remarkable. There are people walking around alert after taking doses of oxycontin that would throw me or anybody else in this thread into a drugged haze. So just because you are on opioids does not necessarily mean you are a danger to self or others.
Consequently, there is no good decision to be made here. Either you waive positive results for people who have prescriptions, in which case you get doctor-shoppers and addicts, or you do not, in which case you deny employment to people who merely have medical conditions. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Most of the statistics supporting drug testing involve post-incident testing.
In other words, there are plenty of studies out there on workplace accidents... where after the accident, they took the person responsible, gave him a drug test, and he tested positive for something.
These results lead to factoids being thrown about like "drugs are responsible for X% of workplace accidents."
They're bullshit and no serious researcher would say anything like that.
If a truck driver crashes his truck, and he tests positive for marijuana, as others have stated, that doesn't mean he was impaired at time of crash, because marijuana metabolites linger for weeks.
If a truck driver crashes his truck, and he tests positive for cocaine or amphetamines, was the drug the cause of the crash, or was he self-medicating for fatigue?
If a truck driver crashes his truck, and he tests positive for opioids... well, you get the idea.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I work IN the oil and gas industry in Canada, and I have the feeling that most employees have the same feelings re: drug use and testing that you do. Pre-employment screening A-ok, post-incident acceptable, random testing squicky without fair application company wide.
My personal experience does come with an exception however (and unrelated to transit employee testing so please bear with me). Los of O&G companies do work in remote areas, and rely on temporary or long term work camps to house and feed their workers. By the nature of people being who they are, many of these camps have to be "dry" camps because the workers are really not really ever "off duty" - you are getting paid per diem by your employer even as a contractor. Keeping tight reins on alcohol and recreational drug use for camp workers via random testing IS something I support - I never wanted to be working next to the guy who's after-hours activities got so addictive that they couldn't put it away during the work hitch. That guy is a risk to himself and the rest of us and could be the reason we'd all lose our jobs by getting the site shut down for a fatality or incident investigation.
For the transit employee example, I'd only be open to random testing if the test screened for under 24 hours usage. If you haven't sobered up or cleaned up at least the day before you're going to be driving or shuttling mass numbers of citizens, perhaps it's not unreasonable that we want to get them out from behind the wheel.
Mmmmm....toasty.
This takes longer than a standard screening test but the results are accurate and in my opinion should be standard screening process. If you are a business and not having your drug tests done by this method, you are doing it wrong.
Testing on employment is actually a huge part of the problem. If you test everyone, you need to keep those testing costs as low as possible, especially if you are already operating a minimum wage workforce.
That means that the testing industry is going to be oriented to cheap, high-volume, quick testing.
you'd have to perform the GC/MS prior to metabolism - eg, on a blood sample, not on a urine sample
otherwise you're performing GC/MS on urine metabolites, which has poor specificity for biological, not technological, reasons.
eg how do you tell the difference between codeine metabolites and heroin metabolites in urine? you can't, because they both metabolize to morphine in vivo
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The analyte 6-acetylmorphine will be present in a urine specimen if heroin has been metabolized. Otherwise it will only show morphine.
The only time I see an issue is with codeine and morphine but if the ng/ml range is not completely out of whack and both are present, a prescription for codeine will get it overturned to a negative.
and the cost & inconvenience of doing so meant they only did it in really really important cases (say, on an oil platform)
I would still wonder if it was really improving workplace safety but I wouldn't really have a problem with it
as opposed to piss testing the dude who stands around the front door of Wal-Mart greeting customers
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Lana_yup.avi
Okay, you're right about that one.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Still, heroin can only be detected for 8 hours after use in amphetamine/methamphetamine immunoassays or gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy tests. After that you're only going to get the morphine metabolite regardless.
I think the actual reasoning is that if you ever use recreational drugs (discounting tobacco and alcohol, of course, because reasons), it means you make bad decisions, and nobody wants people who make bad decisions in important positions. Because if you're the sort of person who'll light up on the weekends, well, you're probably the sort of person who'll stick a bobble-head through the paper-shredder just to see what happens.
It's also another easy way to pare down the huge number of qualified applicants for a position.
In your experience, does random testing actually improve safety, or are accidents happening regardless? I know how many safety meetings you guys have; are these topics discussed, or are the kind of taboo to talk about?
Xbox Gamertag: GAMB1NO325Xi
With the ratio of both when it breaks down it should not be an issue. The morphine levels will not surpass the federal cutoff levels when the heroine is no longer present and thus will not be a positive even when detected.
I'm not going to lie - if I'm a hiring manager, I don't want a person who can't get their shit together enough to piss clean at a job interview.
You know it's coming, and you know how to pass it - don't smoke weed for a week or two, don't do drugs a few days before. If you can't even get that right, you PROBABLY are going to be problematic in other areas.
I don't even care if someone cheats and gets away with it, if you can't pass that incredibly low bar, there's someone who can.
I've also never known a workplace to have you take a drug test unless they were already seriously considering hiring you. There are cheaper and easier ways to pare down a huge pool of qualified applicants - the drug test is a final part of the process, not the first part.
Right, for sure. I was just bringing it up because you'd have to get really lucky to catch a heroin user. I mean, you practically have to test them while they're on it.
Yeah, that is basically the case. It moves pretty fast.
As for stopping Marijuana use for two weeks before a test as someone above stated... not going to save you. That sticks around for a nice long time. Three months is not uncommon and it can take longer. The federal cutoff for that using gc/ms is 15 nm/ml which is mighty low. Standard screening cutoff is 50 ng/ml on thc but those tests are famous for false positives.
Better safety policy and safety culture do way more than random drug testing to make workplaces safer. The person who WOULD toke up or have a drink before a shift would be less likely to do so if the safety program in place had better penetration, such that the employee was taking safety lessons home with them.
Safety is a tricky issue for industry nowadays. The business looks at it from a cost standpoint, most of the time. Cost of downtime, insurance payout, lawsuits, incompetence fines vs due diligence, training, toolbox/tailgate meetings? Ok, but let's use as few resources as required to cover our asses.
That approach has the worst results. The more personable approach has had much greater success - would you want your kid working here if you knew about the hazards all around you every day? How about the hazards at home? Let's work together to get everyone home AND back to work tomorrow, everyday.
Random testing in those situations aren't adding anything to REDUCE incidents, but the culture around avoiding the need to introduce random testing keeps it from being necessary in the first place. Chicken/egg, right?
Mmmmm....toasty.
Because The War on Drugs™.