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Thank white conservatives. No, really. It was maybe twenty years ago we were first hearing about this because so many young white men in conservative areas were doing opioids that the local employers had to give up. Once enough conservative weed smokers were voting, that started to legalize and be commonly used. Drivers for the conservative drug turn includes the war on terror and the failures of the VA, and the war on affordable healthcare and social services. Before that, the war on drugs was on the record as being aimed at Mexicans, blacks, and liberals. Also teenagers, but I don’t recall any federal government politicians saying that one out loud.
We’ve had a sign posted at work saying “We are proud to be a drug-free workplace. All new and current employees are subject to drug testing at any time.”
Not. Once. Not even when Jimmy came in to work each evening with the smell of weed wafting off of him. I could probably lay rails on my work table right in front of the security camera and hit one each hour and nothing would happen.
Sure, but that’s not what the policies are for. If/when someone gets injured on the job the policy is standardly they require you to take a drug test then. If you fail you were breaking policy and the injury is deemed your fault, thus taking all responsibility of paying you workers comp off the table. Happens every day across the U.S.
“Drug-free workplace” policy language is also a requirement for a lot of government contracts in the US
For weed, get a medical card, if you can afford it. Usually even in recreational states you can get one and then they can’t fire ypu for it.
I live in a state with recreational marijuana, but my current employer’s policies specifically prohibit even medical marijuana, and I had to do a pre-employment drug test. Looking for a better job, but I’ve exhausted unemployment and all my savings, so it pays the bills for now.
Is that not protected under anti-disability discrimination legislation in the US?
I’m on medical cannabis in the UK, while our system is not set up for it at all if an employer took umbrage with it for a non-operational reason (such as operating heavy machinery vs being on it at all) that’d be a fairly open and shut disability discrimination case. Same as if you fired an employee for being on tramadol or similar.
Absolutely not protected in the US. They can and will fire you.
Christ, how does that work with your doctors being way more keen to prescribe narcotics than ours then? Is it literally a case of follow your doctor’s orders or your boss’s? That’s fucked up.
Side note update for you, thanks to the Sacklers and the hell on earth they visited on us via profiteering lying about the opiates they invented, now there’s actually a gigantic back swing and it’s WAY more difficult to be prescribed strong pain relief, even when badly needed. Count on us to always come up with the worst possible response to a problem, I guess.
Prescribed narcotics would be OK as long as related doctor or company restrictions on operating heavy equipment or such were complied with. But in the US marijuana is still federally illegal. The feds usually don’t seek out prosecutions where states have legalized at the state level, but banks won’t accept business accounts if marijuana is sold because of the federal illegality, and businesses involving heavy machinery generally also still feel the legal risk of explicitly allowing marijuana use is too high.
Weed is only legalized by states here, it’s still federally illegal
Yeah, federally it’s classified as “no medicinal benefits with high potential for abuse”, aka schedule 1. This is why I can sue (or even get the government to sue on my behalf) an employer for firing me when my prescribed amphetamines trip a drug test, but the government can mandate employers that work with it to fire anyone who fails a cannabis test regardless of prescription status.
Biden was in the process of rescheduling cannabis, and honestly I’ve got issues with the whole scheduling system considering that it says cannabis and acid are worse than heroin and forces opiates and adhd meds into the same regulatory box despite abuse of them looking more like proper use of the other.
You can have a prescription for opiates too.
Doesn’t make it OK to be high at a job where that impairment puts you and others in danger.
That being said, there’s no test for THC that has a narrow enough time window to tell if someone is currently intoxicated. Blood tests are the closest at 6h, but blood levels aren’t correlated with intoxication.
[CITATION NEEDED.]
Citation? I’m confused, for what? Clearly I’m missing something because 24 people agree with you lol
Can you provide any citation that a company can’t fire you if you have a medical card? AFAIK that’s not true. As I understand it, It’s still illegal under federal law, and there is no concept of marijuana as medicine in federal law.
I worked at a factory in the rural south the year (2022) they quietly did away with marijuana testing, even for spot violations. Turns out the standard reasoning, “the insurance company says,” doesn’t really matter… they didn’t care and allowed a 9-panel to be used in all testing matters.
The unofficial reason I heard is, they go through the same workers on rotation, the good employees get hired back and forth. Drunks are chaotic, tweakers introduce drugs and are chaotic. Stoners are quiet and show up on time, and cause 0% of the fights, and tend to come with less of a rap sheet for terroristic threats and domestics.
They almost tripped over themselves to look the other way on my stonership…
Yeah I remember when my factory hired a young woman to head HR shortly after weed was legalized where I lived and she immediately got to ensuring we wouldn’t be punished for smoking. The stoners are rarely a problem, and you really don’t want to lose a bunch of people just because their mild drug of choice is fat soluble instead of water soluble
It does amuse me how I’ve had doctors and employers drug test me which only pushed me from weed to acid
Meanwhile I worked at one company in Colorado that didn’t test for marijuana at all when I got hired, I specifically asked. Then 6 months later hired some lady from Utah and they started testing all new employees for marijuana and threatening drug tests whenever something happened. Marijuana having been legal in the state for like 15 years at that point.
America: big on winning wars.
…Lost the war on terror to terror.
…Lost the war on drugs to drugs.
Losing the war in Iran.
And Vietnam. And Iraq. And Afghanistan. And koreas. The US is just terrible at war tbh.
To be fair, America initially lost the war on terror, then switched sides, so they’re technically winning.
We were doing terrorism long before 9/11
True.
Are we the baddies?!
We basically have been since the puritans landed on Plymouth Rock.
I was going to write something sarcastic about transatlantic relations, but honestly we deserve some blame for the Puritans. The English Reformation and its consequences were fairly severe.
Because their leaders are idiots who think attacking the symptom will eliminate the cause.
Abstract concepts dont tend to have the capacity for surrender, after all.
they replaced it with AI/ATS screening, so no its not any better.
I was a regular dabber for years when I quit cold turkey in anticipation of drug tests during job applications. I was completely sober for 8 months and when I got hired without a drug test I was so mad. I was expecting more drastic changes during sobriety but the only thing I noticed was the return of dreams. I hadn’t really noticed their absence during my decades of cannabis use but while sober they were much more vivid and outlandish than I remember them being. They’ve since disappeared again once I resumed dabbing shortly after starting work.
Sooo vivid. Like too vivid. Like scarringly vivid. Be careful easing off the pot, that’s all I’ll say.
I was also taking prozac when I was easing off weed. I had a zombie Apocalypse and meth addict dad, they were very vivid and frightening. I asked my psychologist abt it and she added a different med, they didn’t work. I felt less depressed and anxious so I came off Prozac and smoking again. No more dreams, that I can remember.
the only thing I noticed was the return of dreams
Same thing happened to me. I quit wake-and-baking about five and a half years ago because I felt it had just taken over too much of my life. Shortly afterward I became a school bus driver, which requires an initial drug screening and then you’re subject to random tests thereafter. I’m a little pissed that I’ve never been selected for the random test, which means I could have been happily puffing away for the last five years.
The dreams are insanely weird and happen every time I sleep, even just a short nap. Most of the dreams are about me messing up driving a school bus and losing my job; one dream was me driving through high school hallways with kids scattering in all directions while thinking I really shouldn’t be doing this. I never dreamed at all when I was smoking.
I quit vaping wax recently because I was tired of goldfish brain and, on top of my memory returning, the most noticeable shift was the return of dreams.
I actually dreamed that I ate an edible and freaked out, only to realize I was in a dream. It’s the closest I’ve come to lucid dreaming in a very long time.
https://youtu.be/iCzZM_Sw754?t=140
This is me too. Being a software engineer and a daily smoker for over 10 years was not doing me any favors lol
You know whats funny? When I worked in education, no one cared. I would start my day with some pot after a night of heavy drinking. I bet I smelled like a bottle of vodka. Well I know I did, one day I had to go home cause I was so hung over and no one batted an eye. It didn’t help that the easiest conversation starter in the teachers lounge was what will you be drinking tonight. So yeah most jobs don’t really care.
I’m a medical provider at a university hospital. They have a drug testing policy, but they have only ever utilized it for staff, not faculty members. I’ve worked in my clinic for more than ten years and have never been drug tested.
Pretty sure the hospital administrators really don’t want to know if any of their physicians have any bad habits. It’s kinda a lose lose situation for the hospital, and it’s pretty well known that our field has substance abuse issues.
Health care should be one of the top 3 places to test. But having worked in healthcare for 20+ years a doctor could come in for the drug test, do a rail in front of the tester, make the hold the cup while they piss all over the place and walk out smiling, and admin would think nothing less of it
Yeah… Unfortunately, as long as you still have the ability to bill Medicare under your NPI you really have to work to get dismissed from a hospital.
The head of my department is currently being sued by the advertising and media department for making his own commercial. The advertising department made a commercial that didn’t feature him as much as he thought it should so he just made and aired his own commercial featuring official branding of the university and hospital.
He had to take down the commercial, but he continues to print off shirts for everyone in our department about the commercial. The administration’s stance on the whole thing was just to let the two departments work it out.
The fucking ego of that guy
Yeah this is a good thing. I wish drugs were decriminalized and treated as a health epidemic.
It’ll never happen as long as Republicans are running the show.
Or neoliberal democrats.
War on Drugs: Drugs win.
War on Poverty: Poverty wins.
War on Terrorism: USA and Israel join Terrorism.
Welp I guess this is one thing where ai can’t replace , living test subject, yikes.
I’m glad I’m on the winning team
I’ve never understood the fight. How could no drugs ever hope to beat yes drugs?
And now the no-drugs caused the import of weird extremily strong synthetic drugs which kills millions. Also it enabled Perdue to sell legal opiods. While legal drugs would let people use XTC, MDMA, LSD, Ketamine, Cocaine. Which would get some addicted, sure. But these drugs are child’s play compared to crack, meth, fentanyl, Oxycontin and all the weird shit from China.
Let’s go drukqs!
“I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” - James Comey as FBI director.
Yet the actual unemployment in America is around 24%, so how hard are they looking? Or is it they’re just stopping because they know it’s a waste of money?
Those unemployment statistics often lump in people who can’t work (disability) or aren’t looking for work (like a stay at home parent/caregiver). It’s rarely just people actively looking for work and not finding it.
You really have to dig into how the percentage is calculated to get any real value out of it.
The ‘functional unemployment rate’ that reaches 24% includes ‘those involuntarily working part time for povery wages less than $26,000 annually before taxes’ according to CBS news
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/functional-unemployment-us-labor-market-analysis/
The disability rate and disenfranchisement rates are different statistics. Just straight unemployment period amongst those who can work and/or are lloking is the lower single digit figure, generally around 4-7%
