If drug testing was accurate and reliable….

…then why do they not turn in all pre-employment positives to law enforcement?  Seriously.  Now I have been told, “Well, they can’t do that, because they have to give those people rehab.”  Well, that only applies to already-employed workers who are being either randomly tested or are tested due to suspicion or accident, and even then it is unenforced and commonly ignored and the positive-testing person (whether a legitimate positive or a false positive) is tossed out on the street with few recourses to justice.  Actual enforcement of laws aside however, there are few, if any, protections for job applicants and potential hires, which makes them fair game for the Drug Warriors, doesn’t it?

I think we all know why they don’t arrest people who test positive on pre-employment drug tests, however.  If they did that, the actual rates of false positives would start becoming visible even to the most sheltered American stooge and they’d have a unbelievable amount of lawsuits as well as calls to change the drug-war influenced laws and start regulating, limiting, or eliminating workplace drug testing.  Think about it.  All other methods (random, with-suspicion, and accident testing) have the benefit of singling out individuals as users in such a way that each person is alone, desperate, and without any idea how to protect themselves.  Better yet, since every worker is considered an a priori convicted addict simply by way of having been singled out for being tested, you can have every single person in the company and outside it ganging up on that individual as the tribe’s outsider and make them feel even more powerless—made more-so by the fact that the rest of the employees will not want to single themselves out by defending the outcast.  It’s Witch Hunt 101 techniques—single out the person in such a way that isolates them and make sure that anyone who even associates with the accused witch, much less defends them or questions the witch-hunters’ methods, will find themselves on the rack right next to the witch.  It guarantees that at the very least the accused witch or drug addict will have no friends, as the fear of also being accused will keep them silent even if they don’t join the 9am stoning parade.

But if you’re drug testing mass amounts of people, as pre-employment tends to do, you start to lose both the opportunity to single that person out of a community as well as the opportunity to silence them or their potential supporters out of fear.  There is no atmosphere of accusation to fluff up the tribal “us against them” Drug War rhetoric, and no cohesive community of workers who are under your control and can be silenced by fear of losing their jobs.  And since so many are tested as a general rule without the “singled out in the community” element there will be a larger false-positive number as a percentage of people as well as a much larger number of people who know someone who got a false positive.  They are all at much greater liberty to speak to one another--since you do not have the ability to deprive them or their co-workers of their jobs at a moment's notice--so they can raise more awareness. And if you start arresting people who test positive, all those false-positives are going to get pretty damned noticeable, since it’s one thing to be denied a job when you’re clean or to have your loved one denied a job despite being clean—and that’s going to raise a big enough stink—but when your mother or sister or daughter or brother or husband is in jail because of a false positive that is going to spark one hell of an outcry, and you can't keep sweeping that kind of outcry under the rug forever.  Heads will roll.

Think about it:  if drug testing was actually accurate and reliable, why not arrest people who test positive pre-employment?  The whole purpose of drug testing was never actually to create a safer workplace but to ensure that people who use drugs won’t be able to find work and that will somehow magically force someone with a chemical dependence that requires medical attention to overcome (which is NOT marijuana, BTW) to just suddenly go cold-turkey so they can get that coveted job at WalMart.  And we’ve seen how well that turned out, right?  *cough*  Well, how much more effective could it be if we used pre-employment drug testing as a sting operation to root out all those nasty addicts once and for all, by making it a huge chance to even apply for work?  I mean, we already have private employers conducting criminal investigations on employees and potential hires, so why not go all the way with this?  The government started with “people in safety-sensitive positions” as being fair game and used the wedge strategy to move that along until everyone is submissively urinating for the chance to say “do you want fries with that?”, and though it is highly unconstitutional as well as illegal as hell (seriously, isn’t it vigilantism for non-law enforcement to be acting as law enforcement, conducting criminal investigations on innocent citizens, and isn’t it also supposed to be illegal for law enforcement to conduct search and seizure on the general public without reasonable cause for suspicion?), they just waved their hands and declared it legal for the purposes of “fighting the Drug War” by rooting out drug users and making sure they can’t find work.  Why not just hand-wave a little further and make sure they can’t even risk the chance that their evil specimen-adulterating efforts will fail and they will end up in prison?

I think we all know the answer to that.  Because it is unreliable and inaccurate, and arresting all the pre-employment positives will make that plainly visible to even the most pro-Drug War blinded idiots, in the same way that knowing a gay person or persons tends to reduce people’s opposition to gay rights, including gay marriage.  Facts are poisonous to liars.

For that matter, why do you think it’s so incredibly hard to get your pre-employment results?  You just don’t get the job, and then no one talks about it and you get a run-around.  Because if all those non-using people who are losing opportunities to work due to false positives knew about it, they’d be ready to wring the necks of every drug-testing proponent in the vicinity—not to mention how much confidence would be lost in the pseudo-scientific practice, which mostly relies on people having no idea how it works and assuming it’s some kind of scientific magical uromancy wherein the science wizards divine the answers from the piss gods.  If you keep people ignorant of the facts, however, you can keep your shady money-train tooting along for some time.

That said, I would like to read more on this thing I have discovered about naturally occurring cannabinoids in the human body.  I wonder if some outliers actually produce considerably more of these than others, as is so often the case with such situations, and can’t seem to find work because, unbeknownst to them, they can’t pass a drug test and have no idea why they have so many promising interviews that go to pot all of a sudden.  This would be a good thing to look into, and I intend to do just that.  You should too.