What the movie "Compliance" tells us about drug testing

Have you seen this “Compliance” movie yet? It’s based on a true story about some creep who would call up various low-wage workplaces, mostly fast-food, pretending to be a cop and got managers (and in this case, the manager’s fiancé) to strip-search female employees, starting off with a claim that a customer was accusing said employee of theft (that she reached into the customer’s purse on the counter and stole money out of it) then claiming that in reality they were “under investigation” regarding “drug crimes”, and that they were simply too busy at that particular employee’s apartment searching for drugs to come and take her into custody and search her themselves. It’s an interesting insight into the mentality of the common person to bend to the commands of authority, almost a live-in-the-wild confirmation of the findings of the Milgram experiment.


I’ve heard people express surprise that anyone could fall for such a ruse or that this could even be real. What surprises me, though, is that this should surprise anyone at all. This is a major flaw in human psychology, as evidenced by Milgram, but it’s also an inevitable result of our failed Drug War and in particular an inevitable result of drug testing culture.


Now be honest, we begin our employment relationship with an employer insult to our integrity and an outright statement of distrust—a direct accusation, in fact an a priori conviction, of criminal activity, of committing a drug crime. Apropos of nothing, with zero cause to suspect you of such behavior, they assume before the fact that you are a drug user and they convict you without evidence or a trial. The employer then insists that you must exonerate yourself of these a priori criminal convictions before they will hire you—not that it will afford you an ounce of trust or respect, of course. And the biggest insult is that to exonerate ourselves, they demand we submit to a highly unreliable and incredibly privacy-invading search and seizure of highly intimate bodily fluids and trust them—devoid of any legal recourse on our part and devoid of any government oversight or regulation of the testing company-- effectively expecting us to afford them a gargantuan amount of trust in response to their overt declaration of distrust toward us. Even as they distrust and disrespect us and tell us so to our faces by asking for a drug test without suspicion, they expect us to trust them to not use our specimen for anything other than the stated purpose and not to, say, screen us for protected conditions like diabetes, pregnancy, or heart problems they don't want on their insurance. And remember, they expect us to trust them absolutely to behave properly even as they receive zero oversight from the law, have zero accountability for their actions regarding drug testing, and can do as they please.


What I'm saying is that drug testing culture has created an automatic master/slave relationship between employer and employee. The employer begins the relationship by demanding a drug test without cause—essentially telling the potential hire that the company is worthy of utmost trust and respect and that the employee is worthy only of distrust, disrespect, and abject contempt, and is little more than a criminal by default until they “prove” themselves innocent of any crime.


This becomes even worse when the company in question commits random drug testing on their employees, because that takes the initial pre-employment drug testing insult and extends it to the entire duration of employment. In that case, you are now perpetually a criminal in the eyes of your employer, deserving of neither trust nor respect, and you must submit your intimate sample to them and trust them with that sample infinitely more than they trust you. And moreover, you will NEVER, as long as you work there, be able to exonerate yourself on any level. No matter how many times you submissively urinate for them, you will always continue to be a convicted criminal subject to invasive search and seizure, you will always be untrustworthy and beneath your company's contempt while your company demands constant godlike trust and infinite surveillance over your body and life as the sole method to ensure that you are being “good”. You will never be exonerated, you will never be worth of trust or respect, you will always be a filthy criminal in the eyes of your employer as long as you work there. It's no wonder that random drug testing causes lower productivity rates. Even people who support drug testing or don't think about it one way or another know subconsciously that these things are true, and it's hard to want to work very hard for an employer who holds you in open contempt and believes your flesh is company property and not your own.


Which brings us to “Compliance” again. Finding a non-drug testing company in Ohio (where the film was set and the original incident occurred) has become like finding a needle in a haystack, and even if you're just saying “do you want fries with that” you're expected to piss on command for the “honor”. Even in companies that don't drug test, the pro-drug testing mentality and culture (and the witch-hunt mentality that goes hand-in-hand with it), there is always knowledge that your employer has that idea that you are probably a drug user, that your employer is being bombarded with drug testing industry propaganda without any challenging points of view to show what a load it is, that your employer is being told the lie that not drug testing means that their entire workforce is made entirely of drug users by definition, that your employer is looking at you cockeyed every day suspecting you of criminal activity because of that propaganda, that adversarial relationship with your employer and the fact that at any moment your company might give in to the evil and jump on the privacy-invading wagon.


So, given those facts, given the high likelihood that this girl was forced by that manager to piss in a cup before being hired, why is it surprising that that manager or any manager would force that employee to strip when ordered to do so by a voice on the phone claiming to have authority over them? And why is it surprising that that employee submitted to that treatment, after having already submitted to a practice that creates an undeniable subconscious understanding that even what you have between your legs is not your own but is corporate property to be searched at the corporation's whim? Few people even know their rights anymore, either regarding the government or their employer. Far from being surprising, the was actually the inevitable result of the mentality of drug testing that has gripped this benighted country throughout the drug war.


Don't believe me? Well, notice that when the manager begins to doubt and ask some questions, what does the police impersonator say? Well, he tells her the “real” reason he's having her strip-search her employee isn't just some random claim of theft from an unidentified customer, it's because she's involved in DRUGS. And at that point, you see the manager's face harden and she no longer has any questions, any doubt, or any mercy or sympathy for her now-naked subordinate. This treatment no longer seems out-of-line or unreasonable—because before she hired this girl, without a single hint that this girl could be involved in drugs, she likely forced this girl to pull down her pants and provide her with an intimate sample from the inside of her body to “prove” she wasn't, so it sounds reasonable to her unreasoning drug-testing culture brain that, having a confirmed conviction by the word of an unverified police officer on the phone, that she should be asked to strip-search this “drug user”. The moment he brought up “we're investigating her for drugs”, she was his pawn and this girl became the clear enemy, deserving of neither dignity nor respect, and as for rights...well, it was well-established in both manager's and employee's minds upon the pre-employment drug test that the employee has no rights, especially where drugs are concerned.


Now think about that. Really consider that.


ALL HE HAD TO DO TO QUELL HER DOUBTS AND SILENCE HER QUESTIONS AND OBTAIN HER TOTAL OBEDIENCE IN EFFECTIVELY RAPING THIS GIRL WAS TO INVOKE THE DRUG BOOGEY-MAN!


That should make your blood run cold. If it doesn't, you are too far gone to see how far gone this country is, and you are part of the problem.

The DEA's Pathetic Extinction Burst

Ahem...

GIVE IT UP, DEA!!!  YOU HAVE LOST!!!! YOUR UNEARNED AND UNDESERVED GRAVY TRAIN IS DRYING UP AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, AND THESE TANTRUMS ARE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE!!!!  STOP ACTING OUT LIKE AN ENTITLED LITTLE FIVE YEAR OLD, DISMANTLE YOUR DISHONEST AUTHORITARIAN ORGANIZATION AND START DOING SOME REAL GOOD IN THE WORLD FOR ONCE!!!!

*cough*

I can't begin to describe how much contempt I have for the DEA right now.  Why is it that we only want to respect "majority rules" and "will of the people" when it involves removing or ignoring the rights of atheists or gay people, but when it involves restoring the rights and the bodily autonomy of citizens and is supported by a whopping solid majority of the voters, suddenly we don't care about the "will of the people" anymore?

I have news for you, DEA.  No one buys the Reefer Madness lies anymore.  No one is on your side anymore.  You aren't even losing this anymore--you have LOST.  And you are doing yourself no favors by trying to keep this going.  This just shows, as we have all said time and time again, that the War on Drugs is actually a War on Marijuana, because if it wasn't and if you genuinely concerned yourself with "protecting the people" from the "evils of drugs", you'd welcome the chance to not go on pointless wild goose chases against an entirely harmless weed because it would free up your time and your funds to go chasing after drug smugglers who are smuggling in things like heroine and cocaine.  Your insistence on focusing on marijuana just shows that you have no concern for actual public safety and are only interested in keeping your gravy train going at the expense of countless innocent lives and the expense of all of our civil liberties.  It also proves that the "hard" drugs are not as prevalent in this country as you like to claim, because the only reason you'd want to keep the whole marijuana thing going is because it's the only thing keeping your paychecks coming in, because without marijuana numbers padding your quota the facts about actual drug abuse are going to come out and you're going to lose funding--if you don't get completely shut down,that is.  You care only for your own unearned power and privilege, not to mention your undeserved profit, and your fruitless little tantrums are proving that fact over and over again.

You know what real heroes are like?  Well, look at the legal group that fought the death penalty in Illinois.  Once that death penalty was gone, everyone in that office was at that point out of work in the middle of a depression (I refuse to use the word "recession"--we got to the point where people not only couldn't find work but despaired of ever finding work and stopped even trying, and that is the point where it is a depression).  Did these people start backpedaling and saying "oh, my, well, maybe there is something to the death penalty after all and we shouldn't be so hasty in eliminating it..." to save their own paychecks?  NO!  They cheered!  Even as they were clearing out their desks!  Regardless of what any individual reader thinks of the death penalty, whether you support it or not, the fact is that when someone genuinely wants to fix a problem they are happy when the problem is fixed, even if it means some extra hardship for themselves since they tied their income to finding a solution.

You people are not heroes.  You are like Captain Amazing in "The Mystery Men", who ends up using his influence as both a superhero and alter-ego to release one of his worst enemies, even though he knew the guy would likely blow something up and kill a lot of people, just so he could keep his gravy train rolling and have everyone kiss his ass again like they did before.  You KNOW marijuana is harmless, but you want to forcibly keep it illegal because it's the only thing propping up your own self-aggrandizement and the money that rolls in behind it, and you don't care how many innocent people's lives are ruined by being incarcerated for using a harmless weed, nor do you care about how many other people's lives are ruined by the cocaine and heroine shipments that get through because you are too distracted chasing state-legal, people-supported marijuana sales.

You are selfish, power-hungry, greedy authoritarian bastards, and that's all you'll ever be.  As WJM51 so succinctly put it on Raw Story, "Drop dead, DEA. That's the ONE way you can actually HELP the country."  I couldn't agree more.

Short post about the Fourth

Hello!  This will be a rather quick post.  I would just like to say Happy Fourth of July, and point out that the Fourth is one of those days wherein we celebrate all the people who have fought, bled and died for our freedoms--and that means civil rights.  This day has become a real joke in modern America, where a nation of frightened crybabies have given up every last one of their rights, rights hard-won with the blood of freedom-loving martyrs, in the hopes that their government and corporate lords can keep them safe.  A nation where a majority of stupid putrid cowards submit to strip searches and groping in the airports and piss in a cup, not just for the "privilege" of eating but the "privilege" of slaving like an animal for a wage not even sufficient for basic survival, all because they think that such submission to the established powers will keep them safe from "the bad guys".  A nation that has turned it's back on our Founding Fathers' actual visions for this country, great men who knew the fact that those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for security deserve and will have neither.  A nation of cowards and right-wing authoritarians who would rather suckle at a security theater blanket than face reality head on.

What I'm saying is that if you still support the Failed Drug War and the drug testing culture, if you are one of those useful idiots who cheers a system wherein every person must either drop their pants and submissively urinate for their boss and/or government or starve to death, if you are one of those stupid putrid cowards who thinks that our country needs more authoritarianism and more people being strip searched in airports and everywhere else....

Well, if you are one of those uninformed and benighted individuals, you have no right to celebrate the Fourth of July because you have taken the wonderful gift our Founders and many others fought and died to obtain for you and spit it straight in their face.  You have taken the freedoms that others have faced danger and death to give you and have given them right back to the oppressors like a coward, because those oppressors have given you an empty and undeliverable promise to keep you safe.  You are what is wrong with this country, and for you to celebrate any holiday that honors people who have died for our freedoms is the rankest hypocrisy.  You should be ashamed of yourself for selling out such important freedoms, and doubly ashamed of pretending to honor the people throughout history who sacrificed their lives for those freedoms.

Let me tell you a little something about facing reality head-on:  To paraphrase Westley, no one can ever guarantee your safety, no matter how many civil rights or crucial freedoms you cast aside like garbage.  Anyone who tells you different is selling something.