As a pilot, I seriously don’t care if you show up to work high or not - unless you’re doing maintenance on the jet I’m supposed to fly.
Better is to use impairment testing. An impairment test is a test of cognitive function, alertness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and similar objective things that actually correlate well with how well you can do your job now, instead of sometime in the past.
On top of that, impairment testing can catch when you are impaired for reasons OTHER than intoxication. If your aircraft mechanic is not fit to do maintenance on your jet that morning because last night he found his wife sleeping with his best friend, they argued all night, and she announced that morning she is getting a divorce, leaving him a tired, emotional wreck who will make mistakes left and right at work...an impairment test can catch it. A drug test cannot.
In addition, generally there is lag between drug testing and results. Impairment testing can be quick (a few minutes) and cheap so that you can do it to every employee, every day at the start of their shift.
Exactly this. Pot is probably the most common and it stays in your system for 30 days after use (probably the longest that is tested). Essentially the screen will fail a guy who smoked pot two weeks ago, but pass a guy who shot up heroin all last week. Like the polygraph test, they are deeply flawed, in this case, for testing for intoxication.
Also, imagine if drug tests failed an applicant for having a beer in the last 30 days. Like it or not, pot is replacing beer for a large portion of Americans, time to adapt.
https://equilibriabook.com/toc/
Here, I think it's something like, "insurers move very slowly to new systems, and until this new testing has a lot of data behind it, they won't adjust premium. to account for it being better. Furthermore, juries will continue to give punishingly big damage awards for using it, on the mistaken believe that a toker shouldn't be on the job even if he wasn't high and passed the reaction test."
But it's the best signal we've got. Ignore it at your peril. Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/science/jared-diamonds-gui...
Except that's not true. We can actually test for sobriety. And by doing drug testing instead, we're actually using a worse signal in place of a better signal!
See e.g., http://www.predictivesafety.com/news/2017/2/6/the-advantages...
> Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
I'm not really sure if there's more than a vague analogy connecting Diamond's hypotheses to drug testing policy. And I don't find that exceptionally vague analogy to be compelling evidence. (And I'm one of those people who doesn't even buy a lot of Diamond's work anyways; in fact, I think I'm in good company on this one among the sober, grown-up anthropologists out there...)
My weathered experience tells me to prefer hard data over vague analogies to pop science writers who are themselves known more for their well-written vague analogies than their well-researched hard science :-)
Administer sobriety tests the same way you currently administer drug tests -- upon application, and randomly. They're a lot cheaper so you can actually get more data for less $/time.
Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.
Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
Its not a simple binary "have you been within 10 meters of the devils weed in the past month T/F" question.
To fail a test after 30 days of normal peeing takes something like weeks of Cheech and Chong 2.0 behavior to build up the level of metabolites in the body. There's a whole spectrum of use vs time required to test clean. A buzz a couple days ago will not fail a test. Wake and bake the morning of the test is a fail. The kind of person dumb enough to wake and bake the morning of a pee test is not the kind of person I'd want on a jobsite.
There's also the question of motivation. There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC and there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try.
Responsible intelligent users will not have trouble passing a test. Irresponsible or unintelligent users are doomed, but those are the kind of people that cause workplace fatalities anyway, so no real loss.
This is all aside from unemployment fraud type stuff.
I don't think that's true.
Your first use will usually stay in your system for 5-8 days
If you use cannabis 2-4 times per week and then stop, you’ll test positive for 11-18 days
If you smoke 5-6 times per week, it’ll stay in your urine for 33-48 days
For Medical cannabis patients and people in the #smokeweedeveryday club,
THC-COOH will stay in your urine for 49-63 days
Even if it was true, the fact that it is so easily passible doesn't help the argument that it's not pointless and arbitrary.
"There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC"
Frankly, there is level of education and willingness to study I don't expect from dude hired for simple construction or retail job and you are quite getting there. For the record, I know construction workers.
"there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try."
I mean, why would he wasted $10 on that? Cheaper to do the test and if you fail then look for job elsewhere. Claim here is that now is a good time for blue collar workers so presumably they can try elsewhere. And maybe they will pee enough from beer they drink more then they smoke in the meantime, so they will pass without really knowing why.
"Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline."
Self introspection and awareness? Yep, there is no difference between that and hypothetical chocolate or sex tests.
At that point (and a lot of states are already there!), "Jeez, just don't smoke for a few days" doesn't cut it - 30 days is probably a safe guideline. When it comes to this for a lot of fine prospective employees, I would think it's time to reconsider the value of these tests as a proxy for introspection/awareness/intelligence.
If that was true it would be more efficient to design a test (assuming such a test is currently possible) to measure self-introspection, awareness, intelligence, and discipline. Oh, wait -- don't many people claim an undergraduate degree is also a signal for those things?
So a young person decides to sort themselves out, stops smoking and goes job hunting. They're ready to go! And then? What, wait around for a month with nothing to do? Eventually get bored, hang around with their mates and boom, cycle repeats.
If you have that capability you [probably] are also able to make sure it does not negatively impact you.
What point are you trying to make?
Are you implying people can not abstain from sex for a month?
Drug tests are completely arbitrary, unrelated to job performance, and employers who use those drug tests don't deserve any sympathy when it comes to labor shortage.
They do however ask about drug usage both on the application and when doing their investigation.
It's actually ok to have used drugs in the past, you just have to be honest about it and write a letter saying something about not doing so moving forward (an acquaintance of mine had to do this... not sure what the specifics were).
Once people are have a clearance, most of the tests are decidedly not random. They can be requested for erratic behavior at work (e.g., passing out), but they are especially common for people who are formally busted somehow for illegal drug and/or alcohol abuse. Get a DUI, yeah, you're going to be "randomly" chosen for a test more often than anyone else you know.
If you look at the system holistically with regards to drug testing for folks with clearances, most people would say that the implementation is fairly reasonable. The rules seem incredibly draconian on the surface, but the actual enforcement is decidedly less so.
I have also heard they mostly stopped drug testing people as they where having difficulty finding enough competent, honest, non-drug users in technical fields. Or possibly more importantly they did not want discrete drug use to be a means of blackmailing someone.
PS: I can only recommend someone either answers all questions accurately and only those specific questions asked, or discreetly declines an investigation and looks for another line of work.
So you could smoke a joint today (ok, maybe a bit more than a joint), and nothing more - and three months later they take a hair sample and find you a dirty guilty pot smoker. Yer fired! Or not hired in the first place.
Even in the best case scenario, you have to abstain for 30 days; so if you're a regular user of weed, and you want to change jobs, you'll have to plan ahead, or just be out of work for 30 days while you let it get out of your system. Doable if you have savings, I suppose.
As far as "random drug testing", I honestly think its more of a threat to instill fear, than something actually done. Drug testing isn't cheap, and a true random test would test all employees, but due to the expense, only the larger companies could conceivably do it. Smaller organizations would tend to only do testing "after the fact" or if there is credible reason to believe that a certain person is having issues (visibly impaired or something) - then a "targeted test" under the guise of a random test can be done.
Even then, such a test might only be correlative, and not indicate the true cause; someone might, for instance, cause an accident or such due to a heated argument they had just before the incident with a coworker, but they get tested and fail the test because of a party they went to a couple weeks before where they smoked some weed.
Reading a book is the longest lasting. You can also play a videogame to release endorphins if that's what you're looking for.
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.
Because they are famous for low specificity and low sensitivity.
Does such a thing exist? Is there any independent evidence that it actually works?
Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses.
That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.
I suppose the system could compare your current score with your baseline / sober scores. Or, mentally slow people would simply have less tolerance for being fucked up at work.
All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.
And no one is required to work for you at the wages you can afford to pay...
Want affordable workers? Increase supply or decrease demand. If you can't do the latter, focus on the former.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing.
It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day.
It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.
I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.
If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.
A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.