Pot law could snuff out testing policy – BostonHerald.com
A voter-approved law reducing possession of small amounts of marijuana to a civil offense threatens to unravel drug testing of police and other public employees, the Herald has learned.

The law, which goes into effect Jan. 2, prohibits government agencies and authorities from enforcing any punishment for pot possession with a fine greater than $100, according to the Massachusetts Police Chiefs Association, and defines possession so broadly as to include traces of pot in blood to urine to hair and fingernails.

“This very much threatens to undermine our ability to do the drug testing we do,” said Jack Collins, an attorney for the Massachusetts Police Chiefs Association.

Collins is calling for police departments to stop drug testing certain employees until the Legislature can explicitly allow public employees who fail drug tests to be punished. Without swift action, police departments and other agencies face lawsuits from unions protecting their members, Collins said.

“At this point, it looks like a violation of their rights, and then there’d be a lawsuit and it would cost thousands of dollars,” he warned.

Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless predicted the new law has far-reaching consequences for even school bus drivers and MBTA train operators, who could point to the law and say they can only be fined, not fired, for marijuana offenses.

“People given the critical job of looking after children or the general public, there’s a greater risk now they could be high,” Capeless warned.

Here’s an idea, Massachusetts!  How about testing your cops, bus drivers, and train operators for impairment, rather than the presence of inactive, non-impairing THC-COOH metabolites?

Look, you can still drug test for cocaine, meth, heroin, PCP, alcohol, and other hard drugs, right?  Aren’t those the kinds of drugs the use of which by cops, drivers, and conductors that should really scare you?  Somehow, the entrance of a couple of on-duty Boston cops into a pub to drink a couple of beers doesn’t freak anybody out, but the thought of them smoking a joint on the weekend off duty does?

Yes, the new Massachusetts law does reduce the penalty for possession of cannabis – whether it’s actual cannabis in your jeans pocket or inactive cannabis metabolites in your body – to no greater than a $100 fine.  It doesn’t change a thing about being impaired by drugs on the job.  So what you need to do now is invest in impairment detection technology so you can suspend the cop, driver, or conductor whose eyes can’t follow the light due to ANY impairment factor – drugs, fatigue, injury, illness, or drowsiness.

Ah, but therein lies the rub.  Most of these industries don’t really want to detect impairment on the job.  Too many managers like to add that martini to the business lunch.  Too many critical workers wouldn’t force themselves to work sick when the impairment detector is going to root them out for a head full of Sudafed.  Far too many workers don’t get enough sleep and barely get by with Starbucks and Red Bull.  If we truly weeded out (pardon the pun) all the workers who’d be more impaired than a healthy, alert weekend joint smoker (check my personal story), it would financially cripple most industries.

Don’t believe the hype.  Workplace drug testing has very little to do with impairment and everything to do with extra-judicial law enforcement and cultural legislation of morality.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 10:54 am and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour, Decriminalization, Drug Testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.