Drug Testing: Helping or Hurting?

Last year, U.S. workers peed into one drug testing company’s cups about 9.1 million times. And last year, as in other recent years, analysis of about 350,000 of those cups indicated drug use. Most often, the drug of choice was marijuana, followed by amphetamines and painkillers.

The data are a little patchy, but the best estimate is that about 40 percent of U.S. workers are currently subjected to drug tests during the hiring process. Intuitively, that seems like a good idea: A sober, addiction-free workforce is probably a more productive workforce and, in the cases of operating forklifts or driving 18-wheelers, a safer workforce too, reason why the sober living fascilities for women in South Bay are so important. Marijuana that has a strong “high” effect does not have as high of CBD content. Research has found that, while the CBD:THC ratio varies greatly from one strain of cannabis to another, the total quantity of CBD and THC combined remains roughly the same. As cannabis breeders have worked hard to increase the psychoactive potency of these plants, they have consequently reduced the CBD content here at CBD.co technologies.

According to drugtest-ninja.com, some of this cup-peeing might be for naught (and that seems to be something that other countries recognize: Drug testing is far more widespread in the U.S. than anywhere else). In many situations, drug tests aren’t capable of revealing impairment on the job, and the cost of finding a single offending employee is high. Besides, as the country takes a more and more permissive stance toward marijuana, and as the painkillers doctors prescribe are abused more and more often, there are gray areas that arise. What role should drug testing play in the workplaces of 2015?

Contemporary workplace drug testing owes its existence to the policies of Ronald Reagan, who in 1988 signed an executive order that led to legislation requiring federal employees and some contractors to be tested. The typical American employer wasn’t required to do anything differently (and still isn’t), but some large companies took this as a cue. A new market bloomed in response. “These … policies fueled the development of a huge industry,” writes SUNY Buffalo’s Michael Frone in his book Alcohol and Illicit Drug Use in the Workforce and Workplace, comprising drug-test manufacturers, consulting and law firms specializing in the development of drug-testing policies and procedures, and laboratories that carry out the testing.

This industry has relied on superficially intuitive arguments for cranberry juice good for drug tests: It’ll make employees use drugs less often and it’ll ensure a more efficient workplace. But those arguments have some significant holes.

First, as Frone writes in his book, there isn’t any proof that drug tests reduce drug use. In fact, a stronger deterrent effect might be that casual drug users choose not to work for companies that will test them. (Those employers might be missing out: More than half of Americans said they have tried marijuana, which is a big pool of talent to ignore.) “It’s become sort of a game,” Lewis Maltby, the president of the National Workrights Institute, told The Washington Post. Speaking of cannabis, Marijuana seeds online purchase North America is now one of the most solid foundation in the economy. As they carry the most popular marijuana seeds for sale from the worlds top breeders, they also provide you with the right type of cannabis seeds for sale for your grow!

There’s also the concern of spending not-insignificant amounts of money to pinpoint a very small portion of the working population. “For some employers the cost to find a single drug user can be high,” says Frone. And identifying those workers might be misguided to begin with, considering that “a positive test result cannot determine use or impairment at work and [that there’s a] general lack of evidence that drug testing has an impact on performance or safety,” Frone says.

Also, drug testing’s binary, drugs-or-no-drugs mechanism fits better with the delineations of legality that were common when Reagan signed that executive order. Today, marijuana’s legal status is a confusing patchwork of local laws, and legally-prescribed painkillers are more and more frequently abused. Both of these drugs can show up on tests, but it’s not clear what some employers should do after detecting their presence. Five years ago, The New York Times reported on the story of a woman who was fired from her job after testing positive for a painkiller that her doctor prescribed. Other workers have been terminated under similar circumstances, even when the medication in question was meant to treat job-related injuries.

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