Failing a workplace drug test can mean the loss of your job.
Losing your job can mean the loss of your home.
Sure, the fact that the shooting happened at a drug testing facility may be just coincidence. Maybe he’s been dumped by a woman who works there. Maybe he used to work there and got fired. But I’ve got my money on “working man with long career loses job because of drug test, returns to exact his revenge.”
Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 10:15 am | By: Radical Russ
(Guardian UK) “I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.
What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.
For not only is cocaethylene toxic in the liver, it is also blamed for heart attacks in the under-40s and a surge in social problems. But because so little is known about the drug, few experts can agree on the nature of the threat to users, and indeed society as a whole.
Cocaine-related deaths are also increasing in the US. The US National Household Drug Survey estimated that around five million people used alcohol and cocaine each month.
Yes, but five million people also realize that they can have a great Friday or Saturday night out on the town, dancing and drinking til the wee morning hours, with a bump of coke every now and then, sleep it off Sunday, and unless their workplace random drug testing pops them early on Monday morning, they can probably pass a urine screen.
But if 14 million people wanted to have a fun weekend with a toke of a natural, herbal social relaxant shared communally among friends, knowing it is non-toxic to their liver and far safer to themselves and society than alcohol or cocaine or mixing the two, a workplace random drug test anytime in the next week to a month means chugging nasty-tasting body flushes and water or mixing up freeze-dried urine, strapping it to their thighs along with a chemical hand warmer and maybe even wearing a prosthetic penis to be certain they can beat the pee test and continue to pay their mortgages and feed their families.
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Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 3:36 pm | By: Radical Russ
SAN DIEGO, Sept. 3 /PRNewswire/ — San Diego DUI lawyer Lawrence Taylor claims that California DUI laws should not be applied to marijuana usage. Unlike alcohol and many drugs, he says, marijuana probably does not impair driving.
On the one hand, the California Department of Justice has found that marijuana impairs psychomotor abilities that are functionally related to driving, particularly at high-dose levels or among inexperienced users. (”Marijuana and Alcohol: A Driver Performance Study,” California Office of Traffic Safety Project No. 087902)
However, the San Diego DUI defense attorney points out, two federal studies contradict this.
In one, the U.S. Department of Transportation conducted DUI research with a fully interactive simulator on the effects of alcohol and marijuana, alone and in combination, on driver-controlled behavior and performance. Although alcohol was found consistently and significantly to cause impairment, marijuana had only an occasional effect.
Accidents and speeding tickets reliably increased with alcohol, but no marijuana or combined alcohol-marijuana influence was noted. (”The Effects of Alcohol on Driver-Controlled Behavior in a Driving Simulator, Phase I”(DOT-HS-806-414).)
Taylor, who heads a large firm of DUI attorneys with offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, Riverside and San Francisco, points to another more recent report. Entitled “Marijuana and Actual Performance” (DOT-HS-808-078), it also found that “THC is not a profoundly impairing drug….It apparently affects controlled information processing in a variety of laboratory tests, but not to the extent which is beyond the individual’s ability to control when he is motivated and permitted to do so in driving.”
The researchers found that it “appears not possible to conclude anything about a driver’s impairment on the basis of his/her plasma concentrations of THC and THC-COOH determined in a single sample.”
Sounds like a “whoo-hoo!” moment, huh? Well, not so fast. NORML’s Principles of Responsible Use states “The responsible cannabis consumer does not operate a motor vehicle or other dangerous machinery while impaired by cannabis.”
The $64,000 question*, then, is “what defines impaired?” I can tell you that one puff off a vape bag full of Oregon’s finest will severely impair your average Kansas ditchweed smoker, while that same puff for a 5g/day Oregon patient won’t even break his concentration from completing the New York Times crossword.
The same phenomenon exists for alcohol; the alcoholic can seem perfectly capable with as many drinks under his belt as would knock out your average sorority sister. But as a society, we decided that there should be an absolute measurable physical limit – .08 blood alcohol content – that defines impairment per se, that is, if you’re over .08 you’re too impaired even if you’re not really too impaired.
As always when there is a story about cannabis drug testing and driving, I called on NORML’s Deputy Director, Paul Armentano. Here’s what he had to say:
Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 12:26 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Virginia Daily Press) Local prosecutors are worried that a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in late June could hamstring the criminal justice system — and cause some defendants to escape prosecution.
In a 5-4 ruling in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, the high court determined that prosecutors are responsible for having crime lab experts on hand for trials so that the defense can challenge their findings. That clashes with Virginia’s court practices, which placed the responsibility on the defense attorney to request the analysts’ presence.
Crime lab workers perform such analysis as DNA and fingerprint tests, gun analysis, Breathalyzer tests in DUI cases and tests of suspected drugs to see if they’re the real thing.
But requiring the analysts, including those working out of a Norfolk lab, to spend more time in court means less time performing lab work.
“If scientists had to appear at all the drug cases and DUI cases, you can imagine the chaos that would result,” said Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Linda D. Curtis. “If they’re required to travel all over the Peninsula and the Southside, they won’t be in the lab doing analyses. … So this could potentially create a bottleneck in the courtroom and the labs.”
One way to fix the problem, of course, is for the state to hire more crime lab workers, but that’s seen as a long shot given the state’s budget crisis.
Some lawyers speculate that many of the more minor drug offenses — such as marijuana possession — could fall by the wayside first.
The Virginia Department of Forensic Science, a state agency, has four crime labs — in Richmond, Norfolk, Roanoke and Manassas. With 160 employees, the labs performed tests for 60,000 criminal cases in 2008, or 5,000 a month. They work on tests for drugs, alcohol, fingerprints, DNA, guns, trace evidence and documents.
Gosh, golly, gee, it sure is a pain in the butt to afford citizens their constitutional rights, isn’t it? It’s just so much easier for a nameless faceless lab to declare you guilty, never mind that silly constitutional guarantee of facing your accusers.
According to the 2007 FBI Uniform Crime Report, there were 32,941 arrests for “drug abuse violations” in the state of Virginia. Since 47% of all drug arrests nationwide are for cannabis, that works out to over 15,000 marijuana arrests. I don’t know how many of those went to trial and required the use of one of those 160 “CSI” employee’s time, but if even one case requires Grissom and crew to analyze a bag of weed when they could be matching up a rapist’s DNA to a rape kit sample, a thief’s fingerprints to the FBI database, or a bullet’s ballistics to a murderer’s gun, it’s one too many.
Allie Brody is a senior at Allentown High School in New Jersey and is one student that has had enough of being treated like a criminal.
I’ve written for my school newspaper, helped out with the production of musicals and even traveled abroad through a school club.
I was later inducted into the French Honor Society and the National Honor Society. Last year, I even co-founded the school’s first philosophy club.
But this year I am barred from participating in any of it. The irony is that my school has made me ineligible for any extracurricular activity for what they believe is my own self-interest. What did I do to deserve this punishment? I acted on my principles and stood up for fairness, privacy and dignity for me and my fellow students.
Student drug testing for extracurricular activity was pushed by the Bush administration as the panacea for high school drug use. Besides, what would convince more kids to stop doing drugs than to give them more time to use them. Allie Brody decided to take action.
Last year, when I found out my school board was considering a random student drug-testing policy, I immediately began organizing a student opposition group.
We worked to get the community involved: Students joined with parents and teachers, donning “Drug Testing Fails Our Youth” T-shirts as we filed into the school board meetings. We even brought a toxicologist to speak with the board about the unreliable nature of the drug-testing technology, the problem of non-professionals interpreting the test results, privacy and legal-liability issues and the general lack of research supporting student drug testing.
To us it seemed the school’s arguments in favor of testing were based more on emotional rhetoric than data. But, in the end, emotion carried the day, and random student drug testing went forward.
Allie didn’t simply accept the schools drug testing policy, and neither should you. Despite being terrible policy, it’s a total waste of taxpayers dollars. It’s an ineffective way to combat drug use and Allie does a great job pointing it out in the post.
In a policy statement, the AAP (American Academy of Pediatrics) cautions that student drug testing is unsupported by scientific research and carries inherent dangers. Drug-testing programs break down trust between students and administrators. They also carry the inherent danger of motivating some students to switch to drugs that will leave the system quickly, like alcohol, or drugs that not show up in the tests, such as inhalants and herbal concoctions.
I commend Allie Brody for both the principled stand on the drug testing issue and for the willingness to sacrifice for a closely held belief. We are lucky to have teens of Allie Brody’s character in America, and as a society we become stronger for it.
History is written by those who show up. [And if I may add... Many of us have had the fantasy idea that if everyone just refused to take a pre-employment drug test, there would be no more pre-employment drug test, because there wouldn't be enough workforce. Alas, that is just a fantasy, because the reality of supporting families and mortgages comes into play.
But at a school... Imagine if every member of the football team or school band or drama club just outright refused to take the tests, what then? These are cases where the drug tester needs you much more than you need the drug tester. Imagine the headlines when John Hughes High School can't field a football team or a band or a play because kids finally had enough and stood up for privacy! They can't expel or suspend the kids for not going out for extracurriculars. The district will be paying the salary of a coach, a conductor, or a director with no students to teach. If everyone did it, there's no way to single out the "stoners" from the rest.
NORML does not at all support the use of marijuana by those under age eighteen except in medical circumstances as directed by a physician. But we do support the privacy rights of students not to be accused of being drug users for merely trying out for extracurriculars. C'mon, kids, show your elders a thing or two - just say no to school drug testing. --"R"R]
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Richard Evans, former NORML Board member, author of Massachusetts SB2929 and HB1801, measures to legalize the marijuana industry in Massachusetts. Learn more at cantaxreg.org.
Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 12:17 pm | By: Radical Russ
Washington, DC: Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), along with Reps. Peter Defazio (D-OR), Jean Schmidt (R-OH) and Lee Terry (R-NE), has introduced legislation in Congress to criminalize the production and sale of any commercial products intended to influence drug test results, such as diuretic teas or chemical adulterants. The bill, H.R. 858, is now before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
As introduced, the proposal would “prohibit the manufacture, marketing, sale, or shipment in interstate commerce of products designed … to produce a false or misleading outcome of a test for the presence of a controlled substance.”
More than a dozen states have enacted similar laws.
Of the tens of millions of workplace drug tests performed annually in the United States, an estimated 90 percent are urine tests, which may be influenced by dilution or adding an adulterant to the sample. Over the past decade, numerous commercial businesses have marketed commercial products promising to influence drug test results, including herbal teas and substitute urine.
Sad to see one of my own Oregon Congressmen introducing this (sadder still to see him teaming up with “Mean Jean” Schmidt of Ohio!), but Oregon is one of the states with a similar law. This makes for brisk business across the state line in Vancouver, Washington, where a certain headshop owner advertises, “Hey, Portland, I got what you’re looking for…” on late-night mixed-martial arts TV shows.
This sort of legislation won’t have much effect, by the way. I don’t know how you criminalize a diuretic tea – even here in Oregon we have “health detoxifier” products, not meant to be used to flush your body of any detectable metabolites, no sir, but only for personal well-being, you see, wink wink, nudge nudge. Lawry’s Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer makes an excellent adulterant for carboxy-THC (THC-COOH) – will your crusade rid us of tender juicy beefsteak? Cranberry juice is a good way to flush your system – are you going to put those two guys in the cranberry bog out of work, too? Then there’s always your clean friend or relative willing to supply you with some pee. Will pee trading become criminalized?
Just do the right thing and end workplace drug testing altogether. They are doing nothing to create a truly drug-free workplace:
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 10:30 am | By: Radical Russ
So I get an email from National that was forwarded from a student at the University of Oregon (go Ducks!) In it are links to a college newspaper story on the fight over medical marijuana patients’ workplace rights that is brewing in the Oregon statehouse. Generally good reporting until I come to a major bit of bias about pain management (more detail later).
Part of the fight in ending adult marijuana prohibition is winning the media. Generally they are privately supportive of marijuana; many a newsroom has its share of “midnight tokers”. But like most of the public, they’ve been spoon fed anti-pot propaganda all their lives. So when you find an anti-ganja gaffe in reporting, call them on it – but be polite. Reporters generally want to be objective and fair and like all of us can be blind to their own bias.
Here is the email I sent to the reporter, Lauren Fox:
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 11:11 am | By: Radical Russ
Opponents of medical marijuana in the business lobby are fighting hard in Oregon to hang up the “NO MEDICAL MARIJUANA PATIENTS NEED APPLY” sign in the storefront window. At issue is the portion of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act which states that employers need not make workplace accommodation for the use of medical marijuana. Business thought that meant “no potheads on the shop floor” and patients thought that meant “no using medicine at work”.
As we all know, the inactive metabolites of marijuana use remain detectable in one’s urine for days, weeks, even months, depending on use and body type. We also know that businesses have been coerced into maintaining “drug-free workplaces” and to do so, they test the urine of employees for the presence of inactive metabolites of marijuana. Thus we have the patient who medicates after work but is sober the next day at work. He would fail the drug test, but not be impaired in the slightest.
Business feels that having a drug-test-failing employee on the job is accommodation of medical marijuana, which they believe OMMA does not require of them. Patients feel that so long as they aren’t using or impaired on the job, the workplace is accommodating nothing but their dirty pee.
So to address the issue, rather than giving a pass to medical marijuana patients or scrapping urine testing in favor of proven technologies that actually detect impairment, business wants to write discrimination into the law so that no employer need accommodate any medical use of marijuana regardless of where that use may occur.
House Bill 2497 and Senate Bill 426 both allow an employer to fire or not hire a medical marijuana patient for simply possessing a medical marijuana card. Senate Bill 427 goes further by not only openly discriminating against patients, but also specifically defines inactive metabolites as proof of drug impairment (I understand the Senate also wants to define pi as equal to 3.15 exactly, but that don’t make it so, either). The bill also gives employers the maximum latitude in drug testing, so far as to even immunize employers from lawsuits over false positives. Most egregiously, the bill requires anyone who seeks to get a medical marijuana card to notify their employer first.
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
RevRayGreen: maybe Oprah smokes and keeps it on the DL...
SneakerPimp: and good afternoon
mr reuben: I could do without seeing Rob K. on tv. But Bruce and Eithan get a big thumbs up from me.
SneakerPimp: waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
mr reuben: I don't respect her opinion bluzguy.
Missippi Hippy: Something about the last year in a contract... folks become more ballsey... and Oprah has big ones.
Marijuana-Related Health Costs Minimal Compared To Those Of Alcohol, Tobacco; California Medical Association Says Pot Prohibition Is A "Failed Public Health Policy"; Oregon: State NORML Affiliate Opens First 'Cannabis Café'. […]
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
2 dead, 2 injured at shooting in Portland-area drug testing center
waitn for NSL and congrast for spofett.
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