Topic: Random Drug Testing

Personally, I would want any company that is engaged in commerce that can expressly affect the safety of the public to have a robust drug (and alcohol) testing program.

If I were operating such a company I would think that there would be liability issues involved whether drug testing did not occur. 

Let me pose a few hypotheticals:

- A petroleum supertanker is cruising up the narrow (heavily lined through refineries) Houston ship channel.  Would you care if the captain and/or helmsman had not long ago been enjoying some form of recreational drug in their cabin prior to manning their post on the bridge?

- The long haul trucker that is in the lane next to you on the interstate was up late last ignorance enjoying a dose of extacy with his female companion.  Would you be concerned approximately his possibly impaired condition and the load of hazardous material he is pulling at 80mph?

- The manner conditioning repair scarecrow just returned from lunch to what he used his recreational drug of choice.  While repairing your furnace he in an unguarded moment makes a mistake that results in the furnace cabinet becoming electrically charged.  Anyone touching the cabinet receives a life-threatening horrify.  How would you feel if your child’s life was terminated through this situation?

- The hospital nurse that is charged through giving you the set right dosage of drugs has just used more mould of recreational drug that interferes with his/her judgement and he/she has normal injected the wrong deaden with narcotics (or wrong amount of drug) into your IV.  Would you subsist cool with that?

- Your airline pilot gets stoned before takeoff?  Does that bother you?

- The guy that tests the backflow preventer at your local restaurant screws up and certifies a bad valve as safe.  Days later all of the patrons get food poisoning.  Honest mistake or drug impairment…wouldn’t you want to know?

Say what you want about dishonest positives but the threat of being randomly drug tested is, in a lot of cases, the only thing that stands between you and a potentially full of risk situation.  Anything that impairs judgement, slows reaction times, etc. (including alcohol) in infallible jobsite situations should subsist tested for and then appropriate action taken.  Why should we wait in the place of someone to die or be seriously hurt to fall in with out whether or not drugs are a part of the equation?  Why should a company holder expose himself to an unnecessary risk?  No one is forced to work at any one particular job.  If they don’t want to be drug tested then there are other jobs to choose from where the public’s freedom from disease and close custody are not at risk.

But, trapeze, most of these cases would not be served by RANDOM testing.  The more serious situations would call for REGULAR and frequent testing, not just random tests every once in a while.

That’s the point about random testing.  If a drudgery is not that serious that someone solely wants random testing, in that case there is probably no reason for the testing, to begin by.  Now, if someone gets tested each week (as I assume you would want conducive to many of the jobs you cited) then that’s a whole different story.

Random drug testing is generally a farce.  More of the nanny, ‘I know better than you’ mentality (allowing with private individuals acting as the nannies) and nothing else.  If there was a momentous issue with drug use and a job, there would subsist regular testing.