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0 pointshotnfresh2y ago0 comments

Government contractors. It’s a legal requirement. They schedule you at a local-to-you testing center. They’re everywhere, because truck drivers and some other jobs are legally required to test.

It’s very dumb. Scheduled-in-advance piss tests aren’t great for catching much other than weed. Most other things aren’t detected in urine after 2-3 days. Weed metabolites, which is what they test for, stick around for potentially weeks. The whole exercise will be practically pointless if weed ever gets removed from the set of things they’re testing for.

[edit] what I’d love to see replace this junk is some kind of probably-computerized attention and reaction test, for jobs where it actually matters. Which is only a subset of the ones that currently test, but, when it comes to truck drivers and heavy machinery operators and such, I don’t care if they like to do drugs off hours, but I do care if some straight-edge driver is too tired to drive, and that’d catch those cases, too. Maybe open to cheating, but piss tests are routinely cheated anyway.

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gumby2y ago

> Government contractors. It’s a legal requirement.

Probably things have changed, but back in the mid 90s we had our first government contract, and one thing was that we were required to have a "drug testing policy".

A couple of team suggestions were "you bring 'em we'll test 'em" and "employees have access to private ceramic urine collection devices. After collection, other employees do not have access to the results of processing".

In the end we sent in "Our policy is not to test for drugs" and we got our contract.

(I agree with you that what matters is actual functional risk, not paranoia)

hattmall2y ago

But hordes of people still fail them for non-weed. I think if you can go the 3 days needed to be clean then it's not really an issue. People with real opiate, benzo or stimulant addictions can't typically go 3 days without using. And there's build up so you can have extended duration of being positive.

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