Michael got Dwight to pee in a coffee cup for him.
Best of luck to you, anonymous Shafter
That's what she said!
isn't there some hair test with a longer window?
2: Why would she think he needed it?
If you're getting a hair test, you're fucked. But those are expensive as hell and never used for the sort of broad screens most of us will ever face.
Yeah, hair tests, you're screwed. (College athletics tests hair samples.)
Apostropher's advice is on the money.
If you're an infrequent smoker, 2 clean days should do. If you're frequent, you'll need a couple of weeks, maybe a month at most.
College athletics tests hair samples.
I didn't know this. Harsh.
Not really. They'll take hair from other places.
Then how do they do drug tests of people on the swim team???
11: Turn around and bend over, Aquaman.
uhmmm drugs are bad. uuhmmm don't do drugs cause drugs are bad.
teh hero is right on the money with this. my brother made it through a whole year of bi-weekly testing during which he was smoking the whole fucking time in such wise (massive amounts of water and B-vitamins for the healthy glow. that's pretty much all that's in the kleen-test kit at the hippie coop anyway). I was fucking pissed off b/c the tests were all that was standing between him and some pretty serious jail time, but it's hard to cop that wise older sister attitude when you're all strung out on heroin. ah, memories. getting sober totally kicks ass. so, if this is a one-time job thing then, yeah, push it back, put the bong down for a week or two, and drink 2 liters of water on the way into the test. then you can welcome sweetleaf back into your life. speaking of which, the butthole surfer song sweatloaf is really great and even has doors lyrics.
the butthole surfer song sweatloaf
I was thinking of this song during the Doors thread last night, Alameida. "Would you tell your mom... SATAN!!!"
That bit about the copy machine was funny. The one time I ever had to have a drug test was in the 90s too, and the most dangerous device I was operating was Microsoft Word. I guess I can see if you're flying 767s or something but I didn't get the point most of the time, other than as a ritual performance of some sort. We are all powerful. We can make you pee in a cup, serf.
I can't believe we've made it this far, and no one looked on Wikipedia. Which, of course, has a chart. (This does not constitute medical advice)
The impractical idealist in me says: You may also consider refusing to work for anyone who demands access to your urine.
Followed link from the Wikipedia article to this NORML page which says that detection windows for marijuana have actually shrunk as testing has gotten more advanced, counter to what you'd expect.
I think some libertarian rastafarian should pen a tosh-esque track called "decriminalize it."
The Wikipedia also teaches me that I could be excused from jury duty in the UK for pee shyness. Oh, Glorious Internets.
Apostropher truly is teh hero. Talk about news you can use. A perfect example of the case of Advantage Blogosphere! and the value of citizen journalism.
18: Yeah, I'm glad I work in an industry where a company that instituted drug testing would lose a third of its workforce overnight.
I had to take a drug test at my previous job. No biggie as I was in the middle of a dry spell then anyways. I felt like I ought to have resented it more than I did. I am happy though that there was no such requirement at my current place of employment, and I hope not to have to work again at a place that requires it.
23: I didn't know you were in the US Air Force. You ought to straighten up and fly right.
(What industry are you in, Mr. Lovecraft?)
23: What industry is that? Beeswax-based personal products?
I don't understand how the business world convinced the non-forklift-operating white collar workers of the world that piss tests were in any way reasonable.
28: First they came for the potheads,
and I remained silent;
I preferred alcohol.
Sincere question:
I don't understand why it's in the best interests of the company to detect drugs use in regular, productive workers. Why don't they just reserve drug tests for when they need to document a problem?
Isn't it a little expensive to test all your workers, and you only find out information you didn't want to know anyway?
I guess you could make the case for first-time hires. Then it's just an annoying hoop to make productive-drug-users prove that they're responsible enough to outsmart the test.
30: My understanding is that screening your employees for drug use gets you a discount on group health insurance. If your employees are responsible enough to outsmart the test, they're a good insurance risk?
re: 28
Yeah, that kind of stuns me. They (tests) aren't routine here in the UK, though.
In fact I can't think of anyone I've heard of other than train drivers and pilots who are regularly tested.
I can't imagine a situation in which I'd consent to one (even though I'd pass it), for civil liberties reasons.
ttaM: The British armed forces have frequent, unannounced, compulsory drug tests. Positive once and you get a warning. Positive twice and you're out. Officers and senior NCOs don't even get the warning. I think the police have the same deal.
I see your point on civil liberties issues, but I think there's also quite a good case that people who handle lethal weapons should be fairly unstoned.
30: The only logic I can see in it (which likely isn't actually there) is that if you give an employee two weeks' warning—enough time to get clean naturally—and they still come up positive, then maybe you have somebody with a problem. The whole thing is bullshit, though. If drug use is affecting somebody's work performance, you usually know it without having to request bodily fluids.
21: This made me think for a moment that drug tests were now part of jury service in Britain.
Which reminds me: we (the inhabitants of the axis of the willing) are overdue for another ritualised mass humiliation. It's been a good few months since the liquids on planes scare.
re: 33
FWIW, I can't see a situation -- absent possible world scenarios in which the UK is invaded by flesh-eating giant sentient spiders or something -- in which I'd be in the military.
But I can see the reasoning behind compulsory testing for certain military personnel.
35: Arabs with GIANT PENISES bludgeoned an old lady to death in a dark alley! All men with large penises are hereby forbidden from plane travel and home ownership! Go somewhere you won't feel like an outcast, you freaks!
And it's hardly as if squaddies aren't allowed to drink.
My understanding is that drug testing is an objectified version of a purge of heretics. In the US you can't outlaw an attitude or an idea, but you can outlaw a behavior correlated with an idea, e.g. pot smoking. (And you can't outlaw a race, but you can outlaw a behavior associated with a race, for example crack). Drugs were possible to outlaw because of the medical / FDA angle -- drugs were already regulated, and marijuana could be shoehorned in.
The drug war also made it possible to physicalize and externalize the actual social and psychological problems, so that parents with a problem kid can blame drugs rather than try to understand what's really happening. Every once in awhile you'll see a case of a supposed druggy who was actually an non-user, but just a drugfree criminal, madperson, or troublemaker.
The original 70's use of marijuana as a marker for bad thinking made some sense, but now marijuana is widely distributed and marijuana users can be of any belief, and marijuana-only users tend to be especially non-violent.
But the drug issue remains a poltiical football with a constituency which includes prison guards and the owners of for-profit prisons (along with the insane Armageddon Christians, et al). I doubt that the drug laws will be relaxed before my generation is dead.
They (tests) aren't routine here in the UK, though
Thank god we have a written bill of rights, and not some vague Burkean sense of liberties.
Workplace drug-testing, of course, is also part of a general move toward authoritarianism and also correlates with union-busting. Once you have a Christmas tree, anyone can hang their thing on it. There are also multiple enterprises selling counseling, therapy, paranoid fears, spirituality, and self-help which hitchhike on the anti-drug hysteria.
This is not todeny that therapy can be a good thing. My sister's clients all have major problems in their lives, and drugs and alcohol are part of that, but in a lot of cases it's very hard to say that their problems are simply caused by drugs -- for various reasons they were usually on the edge already.
re: 40
Heh. Our liberties have taken quite a beating in the past 20 years (accelerating under Nu-L4b3r).
I don't understand why it's in the best interests of the company to detect drugs use in regular, productive workers. Why don't they just reserve drug tests for when they need to document a problem?
The health insurance answer in 31 is interesting. I always assumed it was more of an avoiding-liability issue -- part of that lawyer-driven arms race in which companies decided to do what other companies were doing. Because heaven forbid somebody go nuts in the workplace, or even just have an accident in the company car, and it's on the record that you don't even screen for drugs!!
Alternatively, drugs = unpredictability,* and employers don't like unpredictability.
*I'm talking about a perception, not making an assertion.
28, 30- Most companies that I'm familiar with screen everyone pre-employment with post-offer testing reserved only for probable cause IOW not random and only when some decent indication of on the job impairment exists (and that I see as a legitimate disciplinary issue while disagreeing with the pre-employment part).
As to the "best interest of the company" question, there's not much to be said other than testing got labelled as a Best Practice and anyone in corporate America can tell you what happens after the action planning Change Agents hear that phrase. I've yet to see any data truly correlating drug use with poor performance but in the minds of the HR and operational types who love testing it is tied in with the whole 'drugs are their users are facially bad' mentality.
39: And here I thought The Man just didn't want me to use Hemp to magically make the world a better place.
37: Has there been some sort of rumour about me, or something?
I've only once interviewed for a US company (their London office) and is has to be said, the HR screening was alarmingly thorough. After three interviews, didn't get the job. I didn't get round to finding out whether or not there was a drug test.
I agree, 41. I think that when life problems and drug/alcohol use intersect, it's more often that the drugs/drinking is self-medication for the underlying anxiety and depression and whatever, and not the other way around.
(Obviously it can self-perpetuate into a negative, sickly spiral. Not claiming life's not messy.)
43: Wikipedia makes a reference to workers comp premiums. If this is the case, a drug screening discount could be statutory... Anyone know anything about worker's comp?
34:
But, a positive drug test is a nice, easy way to fire someone for cause and avoid paying unemployment.
With workers' comp, you can deny a claim in the worker is violating a work safety rule. Enter illegal drugs as a nifty way to avoid paying for your injured worker.
50: Ah, right, and that's why the mega-corporations make you take an elaborate "if you try to change a light-bulb, you might as well play Russian Roulette" on-the-job safety training... so if you trip and fall it's your fault.
Drug testing seems like the same thing as companies that scour myspace/facebook to see if you have any pictures of you enjoying yourself. Most companies want people who are simultaneously desperate for the $$ above any other earthly pursuit, but also deathly afraid of breaking the rules. The impulses make some amount of sense, but are evil.
re: 52
Some big fuck-off privacy laws would help.
49: Is it? When I was at my first job, the boss tried to fire a manager who was an alcoholic and frequently drunk on the job, and the manager disputed it on the basis of discrimination against a disability and was able to avoid getting fired and get treatment paid for by the company. This seems easily extensible to problematic drug abuse. But I don't know whether such a challenge would stand up, if the behavior being claimed as a disability were illegal.
Heard a story this morning about a guy contesting his firing for OTJ internet porn/chatroom use, on the grounds that he had an addiction that ought to be protected from firing and treated. But those are not illegal activities, merely against company policies.
Also, going back to the original post:
I'm a little bemused that the other front pagers get complicated interpersonal relationship questions, and I get the Dude, Where's My Car? one, but I guess you go with what you know.
That reminds me to say thanks, Apo, for pointing me towards the heartbreaking portrait of the wounded Marine. I sent it to both of my senators, along with my latest please-let's-take-care-of-the-veterans-we-have-and-not-make-more-of-them plea.
Don't know if you saw that the photographer has a longer slide show on the Marine.
Maybe I'm taking weird B vitamins, but if my pee was that color normally, I'd go see a doctor.
54: Probably it's either NY state law or a strict union contract. I strongly doubt that that's generally possible.
56: I hadn't seen the longer slide show. Thanks. What really gets me is the bride's expression in the wedding portrait. She looks terrified.
The Guardian had a four or five page article about the couple. It is a heartbreaking story.
54, 58 - current and prior alcoholism and drug addiction (including the illegal stuff) are recognized disabilities under the ADA and some state laws so reasonable accommodations (time off for treatment, etc.) must be granted which often operate as a practical barrier to discipline/discharge. Casual use is not a disability but that doesn't prevent those caught drinking/using on the job from threatening the expense of a disability lawsuit to avoid the discipline.
Casual use is not a disability
Indeed it is sort of the opposite of one.
Yeah addiction is sort of protected by ADA and the Rehab act (and by applicable state laws). But what that usually means is that you get one bite at the apple. The company will warn, counsel going to an outpatient progam or maybe send you to rehab. But if you screw up after that: WHAM! I have plenty of friends in recovery who got fired after being given a chance or two. Some of them are lawyers even. (I'm going to ignore the way recent SC decisions have watered down ADA and the Rehab act. What counts as a disablility at the federal level is highly contested.)
26, 27: Computer games. Much less than a third of the workforce is actually smoking pot, but I know that I and many others would walk on principle.
Much less than a third of the workforce is actually smoking pot
I know a lot of people in the gaming industry here, and 1/3 sounds about right to me.
Probably lower at my current and previous jobs.
Previous was at EA, possibly the most corporate and conservative of the US game developers, where the employee guidelines on drug use were basically "we don't give a shit what you do on the weekends but try not to come to work stoned, mmkay?"
Current job is at a smaller studio where the founders take their drinking very seriously, and so pot use is unfashionable there.
Drug testing was very much in vogue in the mid-90s in Texas, and what killed me about it was that it became near-universal for lower-paying jobs. I wanted to refuse to pee in a cup on principle but really needed the job, and I got some static from the nurse when I asked about false positives. What I wish I had said to her was, "Bitch, this job pays seven bucks an hour -- I can't afford drugs."
"If one were trying to cleanse one's system after partaking in the smokey-smoke what might one do?"
Fuck it, dude, let's go bowling.
Also: I can't believe, I mean, I really can't believe that we've gotten this far in the thread and nobody has posted this thing. Comes in five authentic colors! Also great for transsexuals!
64: I've been told that if you're looking to score pot in Irvine, the Blizzard complex (conveniently located on-campus) is the place to go. I wouldn't know, though, as I don't smoke.
Really, I don't.
Magpie, you weren't trying hard enough. For example, you could have sold (s/b "rented out") your body.
Quitter.
I took a drug test for this job, something LastCompany (a far more "corporate" workplace) did not require, but the money was good and the psychic long-term benefits of being here over being there have demonstrated to me that it was worth the brief humiliation - and it is humiliating, to have to piss in a cup while a nurse stands bored outside the bathroom and then hand it to them in an exchange that puts one unquestionably in the position of having something to prove.
Now that I think about it, LastCompany did have a pseudo-governmental agency as a client, right towards the end, who required drug tests of all of us and there was some gnashing of teeth but not much else. It was mostly just funny to me, given that the actual D of EA didn't require it of us when they became that company's client.
Also, on the hair test thing: over a decade ago a friend of mine had to take a hair test in order to work the cash register at a Blockbuster fucking Music store. There was a specific system they used to measure time in units of hair, something like 1/2 inch for 30 days, etc.
They would let the new employees measure out the hair themselves. You know, as a sign of trust.
I really think that workforce intimidation is the major factor with workplace testing. "We can make you pee in a jar any time we want, and we have a large number of ways to get rid of you if we want to. But you need a job, don't you?"
Previous was at EA
Hmm, I sorta kinda know a guy (worked with his wife) who was at EA and is now at a smaller game shop. Your first initial isn't P is it?
75: Nope. But leaving EA to work somewhere smaller is at least as popular a move as leaving somewhere smaller to work at EA.
the smokey-smoke
I'm just happy to learn that I'm not the only one who uses that particular euphemism.
First of all, (73) how could anybody ever work at Blockbuster's unstoned? It seems like more of prerequisite than a dealbreaker. I don't believe I've ever encountered a Blockbuster's staff member who wasn't cognitively compromised in one way or another.
Second, I haven't smoked in years but the very thought of having to piss in a cup for a job, just to prove that I haven't smoked this harmless weed, even while having shown up to work in the truly-embarrassingly recent past with a crushing hangover, makes me so angry that I can easily imagine losing a job that I really needed over it. Thank god academic science insulates me from the real world.
And I can actually say this as someone who employed raging potheads (which WAS sometimes kind of aggravating) in the past.
Do benzodiazepines cause one to fail one of these tests? Those are perfectly legal drugs, and it's shitty to think that evidence of their use could bar one from white-collar employment.
Do benzodiazepines cause one to fail one of these tests?
Depends on the test, but mostly no. The one most companies use is a 5-screen that looks for cannabinoids, cocaine, amphetamines, opiates and PCP. There is also a 10-screen that adds benzodiazepines, along with barbituates, methaqualone, methadone, and propoxyphene.
That is to say, there are lots and lots of prescription drugs that could make you fail a drug test, but that's why you list your prescriptions on the form at the lab.
Also, there's probably a provision for allowing legally prescribed drugs. NCAA testers always asked for a complete list of everything an athlete took, down to OTC painkillers, when taking hair samples.
82 and 83: So you don't fail the test, but somebody has to know that you're taking the drugs. Do they tell your employer what you wrote down on the sheet?
To sleep now.
The results belong to the employer, yes.
Apostropher-
Will Ritalin- legally prescriped for ADHD- show up as a positive for amphetamine? It is very closely related as a chemical.
Because I don't particularly want my future employer to know I have a (mild) disability like ADHD.
And wouldn't there be some sort of hipaa medical privacy thing? If I tell them I take ritalin, then they absolutely know I have ADHD (or narcolepsy, the only other thing it'd be prescribed for).