Pubdate: Sun, 08 Mar 2015
Source: New Mexican, The (Santa Fe, NM)
Copyright: 2015 The Santa Fe New Mexican
Contact: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SendLetter/
Website: http://www.santafenewmexican.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/695
Author: Gina Tron, The Washington Post .

EMPLOYERS DON'T NEED TO TEST FOR MARIJUANA

Privacy Arguments Aside This Testing Is Expensive and Does Not 
Effectively Screen for Good Employees.

Legal barriers to marijuana are falling all over the United States. 
Pot, tried by nearly half of all Americans at some point in their 
lives, is already legal in some form in 23 states, and four states 
allow recreational use. Last month, two House bills were filed that 
could end the federal prohibition of marijuana, including one which 
would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act's schedules 
and regulate it similarly to alcohol.

And pot is now legal in the District of Columbia.

Now there's one thing that needs to disappear along with the 
prohibition of marijuana: employee drug testing.

Privacy arguments aside - should employers really be in the business 
of demanding body fluids from their workers? - this testing is 
expensive and does not effectively screen for good employees.

In fact, it probably doesn't effectively screen for drug users.

Yet companies continue to drug-test potential employees, even in 
states where medical marijuana is legal.

Even back in 1999, when pot legalization was nothing more than a pipe 
dream, an American Civil Liberties Union study concluded that drug 
tests were overly expensive and a poor indicator of workplace 
performance because they don't test for impairments. Drug tests 
search for drug metabolites, which are byproducts excreted from the 
body after a drug has been ingested.

This means tests might catch a person who used an illicit substance 
in the recent past but probably not a person who is under the 
influence during the taking of the test; it takes a few hours for 
drug metabolites to appear in urine. Tests are arguably more likely 
to catch occasional users than drug abusers. As the ACLU concluded, 
"If drug-related impairment on the job is an employer's primary 
concern, drug testing is both an over-inclusive and an 
under-inclusive strategy." The study also said that the most common 
"illicit drug users" were occasional marijuana users.

And most illegal drugs are less impairing than alcohol, which is not 
tested for by employers, as the National Academy of Science has 
noted. If anything, the academy concluded from lab studies, moderate 
doses of stimulants and cocaine had "slight performance-enhancing 
effects." The use of certain drugs may not even have a correlation 
with poor work performance. Companies with drug testing actually have 
lower productivity over ones that don't, according to a 1998 study by 
Le Moyne College researchers.

Even if an employer wanted to keep drug testing employees for 
substances other than marijuana, they are unlikely to catch them. Pot 
stays in the body the longest of any classified drug and can show up 
in urine tests weeks or months after its used. Cocaine can pass 
through the system in as little as one to three days, and meth can 
leave the body in one to five days, though this varies slightly 
depending on age and usage.

If a worker binged on cocaine or meth and took a drug test a few days 
later, he or she might pass more easily than somebody who smoked a 
joint a few weeks ago.

Medical marijuana use among workers further illustrates how futile 
drug testing can be. People who are prescribed marijuana for a 
disability or injury can still be fired or denied employment if they 
test positive for THC, even in states where medical marijuana is 
legal. This often is the case with national companies who apply the 
same regulations in all the states in which they operate.

In 2010, Dish Network fired customer service representative Brandon 
Coats after he tested positive for THC. Coats is a quadriplegic 
living in Colorado who is prescribed medical marijuana.

Dish Network's "zero-tolerance" drug policy doesn't recognize medical 
marijuana, even though Colorado's constitution has allowed the use of 
cannabis with written medical consent since 2000. (Interestingly, 
some companies that ban pot will allow medically prescribed 
OxyContin, at one point the poster child for prescription pill abuse 
in the United States.)

Screening for pot was never good policy for employers.

Continuing to do so as medical marijuana became legal made even less sense.

Now that recreational use becomes more acceptable under the law, it's 
downright illogical.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom