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There is always a chance for a false positive, as well as false negative

Presumably then, you would fire a valued, long-time employee who refuses a drug test? After all, if one has nothing to hide, one should have no objection to being searched & degraded like this, right? Or if your entire work staff decided to band together & all refuse the drug tests, you would fire them all? That's my point - drug testing is more about power, about authority, than it is about drugs per se. Drug tests are only marginally effective at screening drug-users anyway. But they're highly effective in eviscerating our rights & our expectations of privacy. They are always invasive & degrading.

With regard to encounters with police, technically there is a right to refuse consent to a search, but when police officers want to search a vehicle or person, they aren't going to take "no" for an answer. Effectively our rights exist only on paper. It is now perfectly legal for an officer to stop a pedestrian WITHOUT INDIVIDUAL SUSPICION, frisk & search his person. Give any "backtalk" or voice objection to this treatment & you're going straight to jail.

This is precisely the type of authoritarianism that has been engendered & enabled by the War on Drugs. Here too, defenders of these tactics always say that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear or complain about. But such an attitude presumes that we should happily accept this sort of harassment, intimidation & presumption of guilt in our everyday encounters with police, as a necessary price toward the goal of ridding our society of illegal drugs.

Of course, we're never going to rid our society of illegal drugs. But the War on Drugs, while it may have failed in reducing our society's appetite for drugs, has succeeded in diminishing our expectations of liberty & privacy, enhancing the power of police & prosecutors, & moving our society away from an ethos of tolerance toward an one of authoritarianism & a presumption of guilt. So as long as illegal drugs exist, apparently so too will exist the justification for the abridgment of our fundamental rights.

If something shows up in the test, they can bring in a prescription for a drug that would explain it or they can be dismissed. It's not worth the risk to a business.

Check this out:

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/0 ... rd-107972/

The problem is, you don't know if that's the one he's been taking. If a guy who does smack or OC's manages to get a script for some low dose vidodin or lortab then whenever he has a drug test all he has to do is bring that bottle in. Say he took one of them and that's why it's pos for opiates. There are also antidiarrheal meds that are prescription that show positive for opiates too. He could bring in the med that he's been given that would show a pos for the opiate but that doesn't mean thats the actual opiate he took.

Same with the sudafed and meth. They can bring in a 10 count box of sudafed with a few missing but that doesnt mean they actually took them. That could mean they have been doing meth and they keep that around in case they fail a drug test.

My point was that just because something comes back positive and somebody has an explination for it does not mean it's the truth, even with prescriptions. The more precise tests cost a whole lot more though.

I can state the following with some authority... I used to be a sample tech at a chem lab.

Sudafed will return an INITIAL positive... then they run a secondary test... If someone was TRULY not on methamphetamine and tested positive, they have grounds to sue...

On the flip side... there is no detox agent that really works, as the tests also reveal these agents... you'll get the job, etc, but they will end up springing a test on you at the first legal chance with no warning..

I'm talking about those instant read pee in a cup kinds of tests that PO's give you, etc. Where I live, most places use those.

ETA; If you get a false positive on one of those, where I live, you either have to take the punishment for it or go to the ER and ask for another more comprehensive test and pay for it yourself and you have to go there within 24 hours of taking the failed test. It has to be this hospital too, not the big ones in the city. If you go for another test, they want $350 up front. They won't even do one without that.

oliveoilmom... What state do you live in?

I am not doubting you in any way, but that sounds... dubious... One of the things we handles is gas chromatography for law enforcement. I have never heard of an instance where a contested positive was not immediately followed up with a deeper test. I can understand the possibility of tossing them back into lock up and then running the test and releasing them if it was a false positive...

I don't know how to react to it.

I live in Alabama. The local court system does exactly what I've said it does. My son was on probation and he's had a positive test and those were his choices. Even if we could have afforded the second test, he would have still tested positive for weed. That's beside the point though. They will not run another test for you. You are on your own in getting one. You have to pay for it yourself, up front. They also charge you for the regular ones they use too, but they just add that to your probation fees.

When I had to take a drug test every month because my probation girl suspended my probation for a few months because my husband was laid off, she told me that they make her drug test everybody when they do that, even if their case has nothing to do with drugs. Mine had to do with driving a car and paperwork. She said she assumes that it's because they want to make sure you aren't getting money and spending it on drugs instead of paying the fine. I told her I'm spending the money I do get on my family and on cigarettes! Cigarettes prevent me from climbing to the top of a water tower with a sniper rifle and getting a whole different charge

However, it's true though. They do a lot of things here that's odd. When a kid is on juvenile probation and they test them every month at the meeting, the kid knows the test is coming. Sometimes they just show up at the school and get a random test. No sh*t! They don't have much of anything else to do in this town, so they do that kind of stuff.

If you refuse a test, it's considered a positive result. If your urine is too diluted, it's considered postive and it's up to the PO to choose whether or not to give you a retest the next day or just revoke your probation. My probation girl said that she had a guy who did construction work who would come by for his weekly visit after work. In the summer, when it was really hot, his urine was usually always very diluted because they are drinking water out there all day long. After several really diluted samples, they made her tell him to either come in in the mornings and be late for work, or have his probation revoked for violating the drug policy and serve his jail time.

Once, I had had a couple of energy drinks and not peed for a few hours before I went. I had to go really bad when I got there and of course mine was very dark and concentrated from it. She was very suspicious of it, but I explained it to her. I know that with my son, he sometimes had trouble peeing under pressure here and he would drink and drink and sometimes we were there for hours waiting. They told him that if he for some reason couldn't pee then that would be considered a positive and they would revoke his probation on the spot.

This town is so backwards that it's not funny.

Last edited by OliveOilMom on 31 Mar 2012, 2:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The deep south... the closest thing to hell on earth you'll find in North America.

I don't consider it hell on earth at all, and neither do most people who live here. There are a few things I really dislike, but they are mainly things I dislike about this town we now live in. I loved Birmingham and there's really nothing bad to say about it.

Why do you hate the Deep South? Have you ever been here?

As a native of new orleans... I beg to differ...

Bless his heart, he just don't know, does he?

Deeply Christian conservative areas (which make up a good chunk of the deep south)=hell to me.

If referring to me, I have been all over the united states... and the world... I have enjoyed most of the south... The only places I had issues were west virginia and tennessee