Last week, when legal recreational sales of
marijuana
began in Washington, Mike Boyer, a 30-year-old security
guard, was Spokane’s first buyer, having camped out for 19 hours at
Green Leaf, a local dispensary. Boyer was featured in TV reports,
saying things like, “We don’t line up for Black Friday; we line up
for Green Tuesday.” Those 15 minutes of fame cost him
his job.
But not for long. Last Thursday his employer, TrueBlue, said the
whole thing had been a misunderstanding. Boyer’s boss, after seeing
him buy pot on TV, ordered him to take a drug test, which he
failed. “We were not aware that he had taken the day off,” a
company spokeswoman told
NBC News. “He was scheduled to work, we saw him on TV that he was
under the influence, and that caused us to start a process of
screening. When we realized that he was not on assignment, we
reinstated him….Pot is legal, and we know that.”
In other words, as long as he’s not impaired on the job, why
should we care what he does on his own time? That’s a pretty
sensible attitude. It’s the policy that almost every employer
adopts with regard to alcohol. So why not pot?
I considered that question in
a Reason feature
story back in 2002. By that point it had become very
common for private employers to demand urine from prospective
employees, ostensibly with the goal of maintaining a “drug-free
workplace.” These tests overwhelmingly catch cannabis consumers,
since marijuana is by far the most popular illegal drug and the one
with the longest detection window. The tests do not measure
impairment, since marijuana metabolites linger long after the
drug’s effects have worn off—from days to weeks afterward,
depending on the frequency of cannabis consumption. Talking to
employers who test applicants, I found that they were not concerned
about impairment so much as screening out the sort of people who
fail pre-employment drug tests.
A positive urinalysis “proves someone has engaged in illegal
behavior,” Michael Walsh, a leading drug testing consultant, told
me. “All companies have rules, and this is a way of screening out
people who are not going to play by the rules.” He conceded that
“you are going to rule out some people who would have made really
good employees, and you are going to let in some people who make
lousy employees.” Still, he said, “in a broad way, it’s a fairly
decent screening device,” especially since applicants generally
know about the tests far enough in advance that they can pass by
abstaining for a while. “The reality is that a pre-employment drug
test is an intelligence test,” Walsh said. The people who test
positive are “either addicted to drugs, and can’t stay away for two
or three days, or just plain stupid….Employers don’t want either of
those.” Alternatively, employers may view applicants who fail a
drug screen as reckless or lazy.
But that sort of reasoning makes sense only in a world where
cannabis consumers are lawbreakers whom employers seek to identify
with easily evaded methods, such that those who are caught can be
presumed to be lacking in foresight or self-control. Another reason
pot prohibition is crucial in understanding the prevalence of drug
testing, I argued, is that the government has conscripted and
enlisted employers to enforce the drug laws, just as it has
compelled them to enforce the immigration laws:
Federal policies requiring or encouraging drug testing by
private employers include transportation regulations, conditions
attached to government contracts, and propaganda aimed at
convincing companies that good corporate citizens need to take an
interest in their workers’ urine. From the government’s
perspective, it does not matter whether this urological fixation is
good for a company’s bottom line. And given the meagerness of the
evidence that drug testing makes economic sense, it probably would
be much less popular with employers if it were purely a business
practice rather than a weapon of prohibition. If it weren’t for the
war on drugs, it seems likely that employers would treat marijuana
and other currently illegal intoxicants the way they treat alcohol,
which they view as a problem only when it interferes with work.
The rehiring of Mike Boyer suggests that prediction may be
gradually coming true. I-502, the initiative that legalized
marijuana in Washington, leaves businesses free to continue testing
applicants and employees for drugs, and many will continue to take
advantage of that freedom, whether out of habit or because of
issues raised by continued federal prohibition. But it seems
reasonable to expect that a growing number of businesses will adopt
policies like TrueBlue’s.
The public sector may take more time to adjust. On
the same day that Boyer became Spokane’s first legal buyer of
recreational marijuana, Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, a
leading supporter of legalization, bought two grams at Cannabis
City, the first state-licensed pot shop to open in Seattle. A few
days later, Holmes felt compelled to apologize for
violating the city’s drug-free
workplace policy by returning to his office after his
visit to Cannabis City and leaving his purchase there until the end
of the work day.
Holmes did not open the sealed package of marijuana, let alone
smoke it. But the city’s policy bars “the unlawful…possession or
use of a controlled substance,” a category that includes marijuana.
The rules do not mention mere possession (as opposed to
consumption) of alcohol, so presumably it would be OK for Holmes to
buy a bottle of wine on his lunch break and stash it at his office
until he went home.
Furthermore, the city does not test job applicants for alcohol.
Even if it did, such tests would identify only people who had
recently consumed alcohol, as opposed to drinkers in general. But
the city does test applicants in certain
“safety-sensitive” categories (such as firefighters, police
officers, and bus drivers) for illegal drugs, which in practice
mostly means marijuana. The upshot is that Seattle is fine with
hiring drinkers for those positions but refuses to hire pot
smokers, even if they are never impaired on the job. That
distinction, which never made much sense, is even harder
to justify now that possession and consumption of
marijuana are no longer crimes under state law.
[This post originally appeared at Forbes.]
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/UcOBxu
via IFTTT