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
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.
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.
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.
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’
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
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
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.
IIRC, many industries still get tax breaks and financial incentives for doing so.
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.
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.
Lots of jobs where I’d really like people to be drug tested though… Heart surgeon? Teacher? Taxi driver? Basically any operator on machinery?
Come to think of it, do you want the administrative guy who handles your salaries to be stoned out of his ass?
I honestly agree, when you work, you gotta be sober, period. What you do in your free time is your thing but asking a little bit of responsibility and not arriving off your cracker at work really isn’t that crazy.
If you don’t like your job, get another job
obviously I care if someone is high and operating machinery. but I don’t care if they were high on Saturday night and it’s Monday morning now.
As for the paychecks- who cares if they get it right? Can you somehow tell which money in your bank account is related to drugs and which isn’t?
when you work, you gotta be sober, period. What you do in your free time is your thing
if drug tests in any way proved that you were high at work I’d be in favor of them, but the fact is that they don’t. The drugs that actually cause problems (coke, dope/fetty, amphetamines) are out of your system before they can realistically be tested for and drug tests for other things like marijuana only prove that you’ve used within the last month or so. The fact is you can’t support drug testing at work and allowing people to do what they want on their own time. The two are mutually incompatible due to the nature of our current testing.
I can’t say if drug tests work well or not, I don’t know that. I don’t care if anyone gets high in their free time either, I just don’t want someone high on anything while working as with almost all jobs that will be a problem. Yes, weed is also a problem, just like alcohol too.
I also think that if you so desperately need to be high that you have bigger issues.
If, on the other hand, you need it literally and really just for medicinal reasons, pain control, whatever, then we can talk but still.within reason. You can’t operate a car while high, for example, pain or no pain.
I don’t think you know how drug tests work
I guess I don’t but that is not my point. My point is that nobody should go to their job being high or drunk, whatever the job is.
If you don’t like your job, get another job
Ugh, such a lazy, defeatist sentiment, and intellectually dishonest too. Like, do you practice what you preach here? If you come across a part of something you dislike, do you immediately stop using that thing wholesale? Or do you complain about it a bit, then try and think of ways it could be improved, and maybe go about trying to improve it?
So what you’re saying is that people should be allowed to get high on their jobs? Tell me about that next time you’re flying and the captain is high off his cracker…
It’s not a defeatist or lazy argument either. If you don’t like your jobz find a better job. It’s called pragmatism.
I’m not saying that certain companies arent extreme dicks with all this, I’m sure there are shitty companies out there. Go work for a different one.
I’m not the one complaining doing nothing, and yes, I’ve left shitty jobs for better one. Yes, I’ve tried making things better. Yes, I got a CTO fired for a lost of reasons, one of them being that he couldn’t keep his hands off the (male) employees. It got me fired too, which I rather expected, but I did it anyway. So no, I’m not the sit-on-my-ass-and-whine-about-it type, but I’d say that you are.
All it does is punish addicts trying to get back on their feet. For anyone else, you can just get a drink to clear you out the day before or just pretend that your prescription medications are causing a false positive.
I’m in NZ, but generally if you work on an industrial site, pre-work checks are normal along with “reasonable cause testing” and random checks are becoming more popular.
For office work, I don’t know anyone that is tested.
Having worked on various industrial sites for over 15 years, I have only been randomly tested once, I have had two pre-employment checks done.
I don’t see it as a big deal here, the reasonable cause testing is done to ensure who is safe, we have nationalized insurance here so there is no denial of claims or anything similar. You will almost certainly be fired if you are under the influence and cause an accident.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The main thing is, as long as you don’t show up to work blitzed I don’t see how anyone should give a shit. Whatever you do at home is your business, provided you leave it at home.
That’s the policy at my business. IDGAF if you spend all of your off hours at the bottom of a bottle or on top of cloud nine, just don’t bring it to work.
Additional problems include: If there is a workplace accident and someone gets injured, both OSHA and insurance companies immediately come knocking to try to do drug tests on everyone involved purely as an attempt to shift blame and deny claims. We don’t have any heavy equipment here or anything so I’m not too worried about that, but there are businesses in America that would get fucked in a situation like that so they’re kind of forced to enact drug bans even if management doesn’t want to on a personal level.
If you’re driving a bus I don’t want you even “buzzed” in the slightest
Which is a problem that pre-employment drug testing does not correct in any way, shape or form.
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.
opiates.
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
