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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I just received an email from a listener:

My name is Les and I love finding the stash every day after work.  I started listening to it – even all the old shows - after i lost my job at Trugreen (a ServiceMaster company) for smoking pot, even though i had a clean driving record, great customer reviews and the whole 9.  Never did i burn at work or in a company vehicle, but rather mostly at home with my wife while unwinding for the evening…

Which got me to thinking… how many of the record 4.81 million people receiving unemployment benefits are unemployed or under-employed because of workplace drug metabolite testing?

In an economic crisis, we need as many people working and contributing to the economy as possible.  To put people out of work and dependent on assistance during this crisis is foolish.

In the interest of rehabilitating this economy, we call on all private sector employers to do away with workplace drug metabolite testing, which serves primarily to disqualify responsible marijuana smokers from full employment.  Metabolite testing disproportionately targets cannabis consumers as its metabolite (THC-COOH) remains detectable for days or weeks after the window for impairment has passed; therefore, most of the people fired for marijuana were probably not impaired on the job.

We do share the concern about workplace safety, free from the threat of drug-impaired workers; however, there are other methods that are fair and accurate that do not discriminate against the marijuana consumer.  If a change in drug metabolite testing is unworkable, then we call for a change in workplace policy that allows responsible marijuana smokers who test positive for non-impairing, inactive metabolites of marijuana to keep their jobs, even if you feel some other disciplinary measures must be taken.

The last thing our country and economy needs right now are more unemployed marijuana smokers collecting a government check.

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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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Local News | Oregon Court of Appeals protects medical marijuana | Seattle Times Newspaper PORTLAND — The Oregon Court of Appeals has ruled that an employer must make a reasonable accommodation for medical marijuana use for a disability.

In an opinion issued Wednesday, the appeals court upheld a ruling by the state Bureau of Labor and Industries.

The agency said that Emerald Steel Fabricators in Eugene violated state laws barring discrimination against the disabled by discharging an employee who used medical marijuana.

A key issue was the fact the employee never used marijuana in the workplace — an issue the Oregon Supreme Court avoided in 2006 when it ruled against a registered medical marijuana user fired from his job at a Columbia Forest Products plant after urine tests detected traces of the drug.

Employers do not have to let patients smoke medical marijuana in the workplace. But the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act approved by voters in 1998 was unclear about whether employers must accommodate workers who smoke medical marijuana off the job.

In the opinion by Judge Timothy Sercombe, the Oregon Court of Appeals went back over the 2006 Oregon Supreme Court ruling to emphasize the Emerald Steel employee never used the marijuana at work — just like the worker in the Columbia Forest case.

Medical marijuana has been opposed by the construction industry, which wants laws to prohibit medical marijuana users from potentially hazardous jobs such as operating heavy machinery.

Supporters of restrictions on medical marijuana use, including state Rep. Mike Schaufler, D-Happy Valley, have said they are trying to ensure public safety.

But medical marijuana activist John Sajo says that during legislative hearings last year, nobody was able to identify a single case where a medical marijuana patient had caused a workplace accident or problem.

Rep. Schaufler sure had a fun time during testimony from some of us Oregon activists. We printed up flyers accusing Schaufler of instituting job discrimination against the sick and disabled. Schaufler replied that the whole set of Oregon Revised Statutes are books full of discrimination, for example, it discriminates against him performing brain surgery or building a 100-ft tower in his yard.

When a politician can’t tell the difference between reasonable regulations based on public safety and unreasonable regulations designed to discriminate, you know you’ve got a tough battle on your hands. They think a medical marijuana patient at work is as dangerous as a state representative performing brain surgery.

See, Schaufler, like lots of people, think that the medical marijuana patient is going to be running around like Cheech & Chong all the time, hot-boxing the cab of the crane or giggling when they notice they’ve been parked in the bulldozer for the past twenty minutes. They really think we’re crazy to, in their mind, put Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High behind the bandsaw at the mill or put The Dude from The Big Lebowski in charge of demolition at the construction site. They really can’t see that marijuana “should be treated like other medicines”, just as it says in the law.

They seem to have no issue with the users of heavy prescription drugs; in fact, we brought forth proposals that would actually test for impairment rather than the quality of a worker’s urine. That was soundly rejected; why, it might burden those workers who use Ambien, Xanax, OxyContin, Percocet, Prozac, or even who just like to knock back a beer or two during lunch. We can only conclude that it’s not the impairment they really care about, it losing their right to fire whom they consider “potheads”.

Schaufler also had a hard time explaining how this was a measure to promote public safety. Since Oregon’s medical marijuana law went into effect in 1999, we’ve seen workplace fatalities remain more or less steady and workdays lost from injuries drop, even as the patient population grew from 600 in 2000 to almost 20,000 today. If medical marijuana users in the workplace are such a hazard, where are the bodies?

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