The Wall Street Journal reports today that people are cheating on employment drug tests more often:
Approximately 6,000 urine samples out of about 5.5 million collected from the general U.S. workforce last year were classified as substituted, Quest said. That’s a more than sixfold increase from the previous year.
Well, sure, but as the orange line in the chart shows, this represents growth from 0.02% to 0.11%. Not really much to be worried about. In fact, I'm a little disappointed the number is so low. It suggests a lack of rebellious spirit among the American workforce.
But put that aside. What interests me is that this article goes into some depth with its statistics; explains how drug tests are gamed; and informs us that most failures on drug tests are due to marijuana. But what it doesn't do is question the sixfold increase.
And really, come on. Nothing real increases sixfold in a single year. So what's going on? Is it an artifact of better testing? It doesn't seem to be. A sudden surge in lawless behavior? Not likely. So what is it?
I have no idea, but here's my best guess: some non-obvious form of cheating—i.e., not asking your girlfriend to pee in a cup for you—went viral on TikTok or Instagram or something. This prompted a few thousand people to give it a whirl.
What other possibilities are there? Take a guess in comments.
the two most obvious cheats are drinking a gallon of water to dilute your urine or just using water from the sink (which would be really obvious from the chlorine content)
the six-fold increase may be due to some recent change in the sample processing (like tightening the acceptable range for proteins, chlorine, etc)
Good.
Pre-employment drug testing is absolute bullshit, and the more people who fuck with it or render it ineffective, the better.
Why is it bullshit? Don't employers have a vested interest in nit hiring druggies?
If only they had the same interest in not hiring alcoholics and abusers.
Ta da! Winner! ↑
Alcohol is not against the law. A company does not want employees doing illegal things and negatively reflecting on the company.
Neither is Marijuana in multiple states. Regardless of this, drinking alcohol while doing certain activities is very much illegal, yet other than a handful of industries, most don't care if/when their employees are drunk, as in there is no testing for alcohol.
Not more than an employees vested interest in not having their privacy violated without a good reason, and "we suspect every single one of you of being a druggie sight unseen" isn't a good reason.
Guy comes to work unable to stand up and with pupils like dinner plates? Sure, test him. Otherwise screw you.
I actually agree with that. Although for jobs where being on drugs could endanger others (truck driver, pilot, crane operator, etc.) I think drug testing should still be required.
Unless people are getting sobriety tests or similar before engaging in their work duties, all these random teststings are pretty much useless to determine if someone is impaired while doing their job.
Pilot A smokes a joint a few days before the next shift, and then gets tested the day before of the flight, that pilot would test positive, and be punished, even if fully in control of capabilities by flight time.
Pilot B gets tested the day before the flight, passes the test, and gets cleared to fly, but then an hour before the flight decides to smoke or take something, and no one would the wiser (unless he is showing some obvious signs that don't need an actual test), and that pilot would still be in charge of the plane despite being under the influence.
And this is for what is probably the strictest industry in this regard. It's a stupid system that doesn't really work as intended unless the person is a hard core addict.
If by "druggies" you mean addicts, the testing catches very few of them. Mostly it catches recreational users who do not go to work stoned. Further, a lot of testing is done for jobs where it really doesn't matter if the employee is a bit stoned because it's not going to affect the employee's work or endanger other people. In other words, pre-employment drug testing is mostly bullshit.
Don't forget all the poor saps who get a false positive because they ate a poppy seed bagel.
How sensitive, powerful (sans the usual caveats), etc. are these tests? And has there been a shift in relative preference for Type I over Type II errors? Those are just a couple procedural details in the methodology off the top of my head that could explain this result. Also random variation, of course, again dependent on the test details.
OTOH, if nothing about the tests have changed, and the 'failures' are put down to marijuana, well, just how prevalent in the environment is it these days? And is the type of environment correlated with the type of job that requires a drug test?
Speculation is easy, innit? And since this is the WSJ we're talking about, I'm not going to bother following up on those speculations.
What those number tell me is that the vast majority of the people who cheat on drug tests are getting away with it. And good for them.
"But the substantial rise of tampering, as well as the patchwork of new marijuana laws across the U.S., have intensified challenges for employers seeking to keep drugs out of the workplace."
This comment from the report shows how much bullshit this is, and if employers truly belive this then they are complete fucking idiots.
Unless the person is actually under the effect of the substance while at work, merely having the drug present in the test does not mean "drugs are in the workplace". Most drugs can be detected days or even weeks past the day when the drug was taken even if the person took the drug during a vacation somewhere.
This seems to be testing for the sake of testing without any actual thought or understanding about how drugs work.
It may be due to more states either legalizing or at least decriminalizing THC usage, so more job applicants are using and trying to evade detection, although I read that some employers don't consider it a failed test if an applicant tests positive for THC. Also Delta 8 and Delta 9 and other forms of THC derived from hemp are legal in some states where marijuana continues to be illegal, so overall I would think that THC usage has increased a lot recently.
I think people taking the tests don't know how they work.
The testing facility will use temperature of the sample to make sure a substitute wasn't given. Watered down won't help. The only safe thing to do is not imbibe for 30 days to let all traces exit your system.
Frankly, I think testing for marijuana is stupid unless the person is driving as part of their job or working with machinery. All the test tells you is if they've had a good time on a weekend recently, it doesn't tell you if they're high right at that moment or if they can't get through a day without being high.
It also doesn't tell you if they function perfectly well high. Lots of high functioning alcoholics hold jobs even at the executive level and nobody is testing them because they get the job done. Lots of people use a variety of drugs in order to function and nobody cares.
We had a name for NCO's administering the tests... the gazer of meat.
There used to be a toy when I was a kid called Six Finger. It was a dart gun made to look like a human finger so no one would know you're packing heat. Unless, you know, they can count to 6.
Clearly, someone has invented Three Arm and Two Dick for gaming blood and urine tests respectively.
I'm pretty sure Two Dick would have a gracious plenty of interesting applications.
Thinking about workplace drug testing, the simple answer is fewer drug tests for white collar workplaces while blue collar workplaces continue to require them.
If the standard urine drug screen could detect how many alcoholic drinks someone has had in the past week, they'd have been considered unconstitutional for pre-employment drug screenings by every single legislature and court under the 4th Amendment within a week of them being used for the first time.
Pre-employment urine drug screens are good for catching someone who smoked a joint 5 days ago. Everyone else scoots on by after about 48 hours of drinking a little more water than normal.