by Charles M. Barnard
One of the many problems afflicting the “War on Drugs” is the lack of proper tests which can accurately tell the one piece of information which employers and or the Government have a legitimate interest in knowing—is a particular person under the influence of a particular substance at the current time.
The currently available tests for THC do not actually test for THC, but for chemicals that result from the metabolization of the substance. Such tests indicate that a person may have used the drug or been exposed to the drug at some time in the past, but does not report wither or not the person is currently under the influence.
Of course, since drug testing is most commonly used as pre-employment testing (i.e. to find out if a person has used drugs before their employment,) this is not really of interest to the companies paying for the testing—or is it?
It would seem reasonable that if substance use (for that is what we are talking about,) actually is to have a discernable impact upon job performance, then the use must occur while the person is on the job. Further, it would seem reasonable that such impacts would have the greater effects upon the public and the companies involved associated with the responsibilities of the employee.
In other words, if you are concerned about the effects of drug use within an organization, the people with the greatest degree of responsibility ought to be checked most often.
You would expect that corporations and governments would thus subject their highest placed employees, those whose decisions are potentially most catastrophic, to the most rigorous and frequent testing. The CEO and other high placed officers would be expected to be tested perhaps as often as hourly, as a single poor decision by one of these people could cost the company literally its existence.
Certainly you would not want highly placed decision makers to be under the influence of even minimal amounts of alcohol, cocaine, opiates or excessive amounts of caffeine for that matter. The potential harm is too great.
Instead, of course the typical company drug tests only pre-employment applicants (i.e. people who are in no position to make any company decisions) and people who have on-the-job accidents.
(By the way, Government employees are not subject to the same testing rules.)
The effect of the current procedures is to prevent unemployed and employed people who use illegal drugs (whether they abuse them or not on the job) from seeking new employment. The current procedures do little to protect either the companies or the public from the possible harmful effects of decisions made under the influence, but do a great deal to prevent people from shifting to better positions with other companies (except, of course by not using drugs while searching.)
Additionally, of course, the sensitivity of the various tests to time degradation vary greatly with the ability of the body to metabolize a drug. Thus, if a person spends the weekend zonked on ecstasy, cocaine, alcohol or even heroin, by Monday they can pass a drug-screening test. If, however the same person smokes marijuana, they will still be unable to pass the screening test up to 30 days later—long after even the residual effects of the drug have dissipated.
Effectively, this quirk of testing tends to select for employment among drug users, for those whose drug of choice has the lowest persistence within the body. If you stick to these drugs, you are relatively immune from detection (especially since most unions seem to have adopted a routine of challenging drug test results, with often substantial periods of time between the initial and subsequent tests.
Unfortunately, cocaine (the most commonly abused of the short-persistence drugs,) is commonly characterized by paranoia and over-confidence, which tend to lead to decisions which are poorly thought out, and implemented without crosschecking.
And our elected leadership, those who can drag the entire country into war and whom make other wide-ranging long-term decisions affecting literally billions of lives, are not checked for drug use at all! And, in fact, are routinely documented to make decisions while under influence of alcohol to an extent that would prohibit them from operating a motor vehicle.
If we’re serious about stopping drug abuse, lets start by administering routine daily tests to all elected officials and anyone above middle management level within the Federal Government. These are people whose decisions have the most impact. If corporations want to test for drug use of employee’s—let them, but job applicants are not employees. Employee’s, unions and stockholders ought to insist that they be protected from bad decisions by drug users by routine daily or hourly testing of higher management. The purchasing VP who buys $10 million dollars of the wrong product has done far more to hurt the company than is possible for a clerical, factory or sales worker.
At the very least, a company ought to insist on a drug test at the time of signing of any contract of great value by their employees, with the right to invalidate the contract if the tests show any signs of drug use. It is only a prudent step to protect the company.
Of course, it is always possible that drug use has little real effect upon job performance--certainly we’ve all known people whose performance was far from perfect, but who seemed to be able to hold a job with no difficulty any way. If this is the case, then perhaps we should just forget about drug use or abuse, and focus upon job performance?