Wow!  I just received a fax from McGraw Hill, the people who make college textbooks, among other publishing.  They happened on a piece I wrote for The Oregon Herald on 4/20/2005 (just two weeks before I met Madeline Martinez and started my career in marijuana law reform) entitled “Drug Testing Does No Good” and are asking my permission to reprint it in a college textbook entitled “Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Management” that will be published in August.  Yours truly even receives a fee!  For something I wrote and forgot about four years ago!  (Ain’t the intertubes wonderful?)

Here it is for your reading pleasure…

Recently, an RV manufacturing plant in Goshen, Indiana, made headlines because they had drug tested all 120 of their employees and found that nearly a third of them tested positive for some illicit substance.

What caused the company to drug test all of their employees? Was there a rash of accidents? Had productivity dropped significantly? Were there increasing incidents of absenteeism and illness? Did a supervisor notice any drug use occurring at the plant, or notice an employee obviously under the influence of drugs?

No. The only reason the plant spent the time, effort, and money to test their employees was due to a police tip that there was a drug problem at the plant. In other words, there was no reason for the company to believe they had a drug problem.

You would think that running a manufacturing plant with one third of your employees working under the influence would lead to some obvious problems. You’d be right. The problem is that a positive drug test does not indicate that a person is under the influence of drugs. It only indicates that a person has done drugs in the past.

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So I wander through the comments on Who Are You II over at the NORML Blog, a post I wrote as a follow-up to Who Are You because of a suggestion in the comments, I find this suggestion, once again, from Christopher:

I actually see a problem with these charts. If I’m reading them correctly, they take into account the employment status of an individual who has only smoked at least once. In my opinion, that makes these numbers a little flimsy.

It would be much more accurate and believable if statistics showed the employment/education numbers for people that smoke a certain amount or over in a given year. You guys did a great job in answering my question, but now that I look at it better i’m seeing a big fault in the numbers. This is not a solid demographic I can show anti-legalization people.

The data are available for anyone to play with over at SAMHDA, but I’ll go ahead and tackle this one, because Christopher is my muse.  I resisted creating the charts for employment based on frequency of use because, as one might expect, unemployment rates go up as the frequency of marijuana use goes up.  I’m doubtful of those numbers because of the effect that workplace drug testing would play on creating them, i.e., the more you toke, the more likely a random UA will catch you and make you unemployed, and the more you toke, the more likely you’re not applying for jobs that require drug tests and therefore you remain unemployed longer.

However, I’m glad Christopher did ask for these figures, because if you look at the other side — how many tokers are employed — the numbers look fairly good for pot smokers.  Here are the figures for US Adult American Employment based on Frequency of Marijuana Use:

As you can see, in every category, a pot smoker is more likely to be employed than one who doesn’t smoke.  And it’s not just part-time jobs; the proportion of marijuana users working full-time jobs exceeds non-smokers in every usage category. They are also more likely to be unemployed, especially among the chronic tokers.

I also considered the category “Other / Not in Labor Force”.  That might be the disabled and the elderly that may be more likely to be non-smokers and therefore push down the employment rates compared to the tokers.  So I compared the numbers without including the “Other” category.

Depending on usage rates, 18 to 19 out of 20 employable annual marijuana users are employed

So it does appear, by that standard, that the more you smoke marijuana, the more likely you are to be unemployed… but not by much.  Depending on usage 88%-94% of pot smokers are employed, compared to 96% of those who didn’t use this year.

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A commenter named Christopher on the NORML Blog had this to mention about my previous Who Are You? post:

I would like to know the percentage of smokers, from those charts, that are successful. The biggest argument I hear is that Marijuana makes you lazy and unable to do real work. So what percentage of average smokers are bums and what percentage are productive members of society?

Ask and ye shall receive.  According to the Quick Tables at SAMHDA based on results from the 2007 National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, people who have smoked pot are better educated and work harder than people who never have smoked pot.

Now it’s likely the employment data have changed since 2007, but at first glance, it appears that the majority of people employed full-time and the majority of the unemployed have smoked marijuana.  The 43.5% figure for the part time workers makes sense, if you figure that more low-skilled, part-time positions are likely to face a drug test.

Employment Status of American Adults

Based on the responses, about two-thirds (67.8%) of all American adults are employed part-time or full-time, and the unemployed account for 3.2% of all adults (remember, 2007 figures, plus these numbers will vary from official unemployment statistics because some of those “others” would be counted as unemployed, but aren’t in this survey.)

Employment Status of American Adults Who Have Ever Used Marijuana

But when you break these numbers down for only those American adults who have used marijuana, we find that over three-quarters (78.3%) of all marijuana users are employed part-time or full-time.  To be fair, a larger proportion (4% vs. 3.2%) of marijuana users are unemployed than the proportion for all adults, but not so much as to be statistically significant.

Frequency of Marijuana Use by Full-Time Employed Adults who Used Marijuana at least Once per Year

There are 12.9 million American Adults, out of the 22 million total who have smoked at least once a year, who are employed full time.  When we break down their use by frequency, we find the largest proportion, well over a third (36%) of full-time employed marijuana smokers are using more than 100 days per year.  That’s 4.7 million full-time employed chronic marijuana users – and they can’t all be snowboarders, rappers, and head shop owners.

Educational Attainment vs. Marijuana Usage

Finally, almost half of American Adults who have one year or more of college education have smoked marijuana, while among those with only a high school diploma / GED or less educational attainment, about one-third have smoked marijuana.  I’m not saying that smoking marijuana will make you smarter, but it seems the smarter you are, the more likely you’ll smoke marijuana.

So there you have it.  The “average” pot smoker, if there is such a thing, is a white, college educated, full-time employed male under the age of fifty.  In other words… ME! 

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Legislators in Oregon have introduced a pair of bills pertaining to the employment rights of state-authorized medical marijuana patients.

The first bill, House Bill 2503, is strongly supported by NORML and Oregon NORML.  If passed this measure would make it “unlawful for an employer to discriminate a person in hiring [or]
termination” based on their off-the-job use of medical cannabis.

The second measure, House Bill 2497, is strongly opposed by NORML and Oregon NORML.  This proposal seeks to allow employers to discriminate against medicinal marijuana users based on nothing more than their medical status.

Oregon NORML is leading the charge for HB 2503 and against HB 2497.  For more information on ways you can join their efforts, please visit: http://www.ornorml.org.

Thank you for supporting NORML’s marijuana law reform efforts in Oregon.

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“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

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