It’s fairly well-established by all unbiased sources that
drug testing is unreliable, inaccurate, and completely ineffective—so why do
some people still support it and want to expand it? Well, in my experience I have noticed that
there are precisely two kinds of people who support or accept the drug-testing
culture: the uninformed and the invested
(with some mild overlap, of course).
The Uninformed
While these can be companies that have uncritically bought
the dishonest sales pitch from drug testing company reps (one area of overlap),
this group is mostly composed of ordinary citizens who simply assume that drug
testing works to keep them safe from the “bad guys”. These people range from the apathetic who
simply accept it because they’ve never thought about it one way or another to
the cowardly who actively support it and want to expand it until everyone is
forced to submit to it on every level of society because it makes them “feel”
safer.
The former group can be easier to talk to, as they have
never given it much thought. Often,
these are younger people who have grown up in this corrupt system and have
never known anything different. To them,
everyone has always had to piss in a cup to eat, and it’s just “the way things
work”, right? WRONG! Of course, this albeit uninformed younger
generation is also the most likely to support marijuana legalization and oppose
the Drug War, and so tends to be more open to arguments against the various
failed methods of the failed Drug War as well as opposed to things like
government spying programs. Simply
explain to them how drug testing works and why it is inaccurate and unreliable,
and once they are informed about the other side of the equation (the side that
has been systematically silenced since the eighties by Drug War profiteers and
their witch-hunt techniques) they tend to agree with you.
That second group, the active cowards, is where overlap
seems to occur most. These people tend
to be more misinformed than uninformed, and they have embraced that
misinformation because of their inherent cowardice and authoritarianism. They have bought into the Reefer Madness lie
and live in constant fear of the “scary addicts”. They don’t want to hear about how drug
testing doesn’t work, or how addiction actually works or why “law and order”
police state “solutions” can not, have not, and will never work against a
problem like addiction. They may often
get angry enough at times to assault you or try to get you fired because
stripping the civil rights from every human being makes them “feel” safe, and
how dare you undermine their security theater blanket like that? These people tend to lack any logic or common
sense regarding the issue as well, and will make arguments that are either long
debunked or completely baffling. As far
as they are concerned, promoting a corporate police state on every single
citizen is their heroic duty, they are heroes for forcing you to submit to drug
testing and you are a detriment to society for arguing against it.
As such, these people also have an investment in drug
testing culture and in promoting the Drug War, because to admit to the facts
that show they are wrong and have always been wrong…well, they not only lose
their security theater blanket and the warm fuzzy comforting illusion of
safety, they also lose their self-image of being American Heroes fighting the
Evil Drug Addicts and the ability to aggrandize themselves by looking down on
people with addictions as inferior monsters who deserve imprisonment and death,
rather than as the average people with a disease that needs to be treated like
the public health issue it is. They lose
their false sense of security AND their
ability to see themselves as superior to other people by default, and to keep
that they don’t care how many people’s lives are ruined. For that they would kill someone like myself
for having the temerity to speak the truth on the subject.
The Invested
This group is primarily composed of corporate entities—both
the companies that directly profit from drug testing programs (such as drug
testing companies, drug rehab clinics, etc.) and companies that indirectly
profit from drug testing programs (insurance companies that want to screen out
potential hires with inconvenient albeit protected health problems, companies
that realize they are getting massive tax breaks and government subsidies on
insurance for forcing tax-deductible drug tests on their employees). There
are also government entities that value the ability to spy on American citizens
internally and externally without cause who have been working for some time to
find loopholes by which they can circumvent the Bill of Rights, as well as
individuals who work for any of these companies and so earn their bread and
butter by violating the flesh of their fellow citizens and have every
motivation to keep drug testing alive as long as possible for their own job
security.
Needless to say, the people in this group will lie, cheat,
and do anything in their considerable power to keep this going, and there is no
use in trying to make them see reason because all they care about is their own
selfish interests. They don’t care about
the rights or wrongs of it , so long as the dollars keep falling into their
pockets. Don’t believe me? Maybe you’ll believe the ACLU in their
briefing on Workplace Drug Testing http://www.lectlaw.com/files/emp02.htm:
“The drug screens used by most companies are not reliable.
These tests yield false positive results at least 10 percent, and possibly as
much as 30 percent, of the time. Experts concede that the tests are unreliable.
At a recent conference, 120 forensic scientists, including some who worked for
manufacturers of drug tests, were asked, "Is there anybody who would
submit urine for drug testing if his career, reputation, freedom or livelihood
depended on it?" Not a single hand was raised.”
Do you see that? When
talking to people like you or I, they would tell you all about how totally
great this practice is and how totally reliable it is and how no one should
have any qualms about submitting a sampler platter of intimate bodily fluids to
their employer or anyone else for drug testing, but when it’s just them….well,
you see what happens. These people know they
are running what is at the very least a product with little to no value and at
most an outright scam trade. They simply
do not care about right or wrong, only about profit. They forced their untested and unproven
product on a frightened and ignorant America in a moral panic based on
deliberately skewed data, and they continue in that same vein today using the
same dishonest arguments and, yes, the same methods. (See “Drug Testing: A Bad
Investment” and “Your Analysis is Faulty (How to lie with drug statistics” in
the post “Anti-Drug Testing Facts: A
Helpful List of Links to Help You Fight” on this blog, tagged “tools and
resources”). Only now they ride on a
different kind of misinformation, the self-misinformation wherein people assume
that the drug testing companies must be so much more accurate now after all
this time—an assumption that only makes sense if you are already uninformed or
have bought into the drug testing proponents’ original misinformation.
In reality, they are no better now than they were before,
and why should they be? When you’re
riding on public ignorance, moral panic, and deliberately skewed data, why
would you actually improve your product?
By the time people realize it’s inaccurate and unreliable they’ll simply
assume that after thirty years of forcing everyone to piss in a cup there
surely have to have been important improvements, and they can ride on that new
misinformed assumption to profit further.
Better yet if you can keep people like me silent about the facts out of
fear and convince the uninformed and misinformed that any opposition to drug
testing is an admission of addiction and that there is no other possible reason
someone might oppose drug testing—and since you’re the only game in town to
prove that true or false, you’re set!
You can just make sure that any employees who are sent for drug testing
because they vocally opposed drug testing get a positive result regardless of
whether they actually use, thereby discrediting them as addicts who are simply
trying to protect their addiction! Mark
my words, when marijuana is inevitably legalized, the Drug War is inevitably
dismantled, and drug testing is inevitably compromised and eventually
eliminated, there will be a lot of facts coming to light about the drug testing
industries many crimes. And they know
it, and they’re running scared now that we’re at the tipping point with medical
marijuana and jumped two states in at once for total legalization.
Most of the overlap in this group is in the aforementioned
uninformed and misinformed companies that have uncritically assumed that the
drug testing sales pitch was kosher without making any actual attempt to find
out any facts outside of that bubble.
Unfortunately, these companies also tend to get invested just like that second
group of the uninformed, the cowards, either because they cannot lose face and
admit they were wrong to start drug testing their employees and potential hires
or because they learn of how much they can clean up in government subsidies and
tax breaks, at which point they fall firmly into the “invested” bin and can no
longer see reason or facts for the money that is falling into their laps.
So there you have the two kinds of people who accept and
support drug testing. I hope my
understanding here can shed some light on how these people think, and perhaps
it can help some of you out there in your dealings with these benighted
individuals.
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