Will drug tests for weed go away forever?

Before we can dive into the future of workplace testing, we first need to take a look at when it originally began. According to the ABA, US corporate culture got its “hack-on” for drug testing in the workplace during the Raegan administration.

You know the movie star who became president, who helped found DARE and escalated the war on drugs. Raegan ordered federal employees to undergo drug tests in order to be employed by the government. Shortly thereafter, the private sector did the same.

The reason for this policy change was that “pre-work drug testing increases safety and productivity in the workplace”.

Of course, in the 1980s you could say something like that, pay a bunch of scholars to put together some circumstantial “evidence” to back up their premise, and before the move – oh, you have national politics embedded in the structure of capitalism .

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The new drug testing firms that sprang up to meet the demand for tests, drug kits, and anything practice-related were thrilled. They had a new, seemingly endless source of income backed by government incentives.

Even if someone came and empirically proved that cannabis does not reduce workplace safety and that cannabis users, on average, have fewer sick days than their non-smoking counterparts.

At that point there was money to be made and both Uncle Sam and Corporate Carl were groping for American freedom while claiming that everything was to their advantage!

Fortunately, things like that never happen in 2021 … do they?

Oops – drugs won!

The 1980s and 1990s were the “good years” if you ask a drug warrior. “Drug warriors” – as they liked to call themselves – were people who actively benefited from the war on drugs, whether it was local law enforcement, for any federal agency that politicians could invent.

Then they could be “tough on crime” by getting rid of nonviolent drug users while not addressing crime where it matters most. Do you know like human trafficking, murders and rape.

Photo by FatCamera / Getty Images

As long as they had a couple of red-eyed Rastas behind bars, they would get money from Uncle Sam and eventually the old military toys.

However, by the 1980s, the AIDS pandemic was in full swing and it turned out that a small plant known as cannabis was really helping patients with a disease called AIDS wasting syndrome. It has also reportedly helped with pain management, cancer, glaucoma, etc.

Suddenly toughness against crime meant attacking medical patients with a tank, and well, the look would surely ruin any argument for maintaining such a policy. But by this point it was too late; People found medical help with cannabis, and eventually some states began legalizing it for medical use.

Fast forward a few decades and more than half of US adults have tried marijuana. It’s still illegal at the federal level, but the federal government’s powers to maintain the facility’s prohibitive status have shrunk significantly.

Once the federal government removed cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)

Then things get interesting. Even now, under modern cannabis laws, companies have a hard time knowing how to respond. The government may be competent to implement these laws and incorporate them into corporate culture, but its inability to correct its mistakes has left chaos for now.

But at some point the federal government will have to give in to the will of the people. This means that legalization is inevitable.

RELATED: The End of Pre-Hiring Drug Testing Doesn’t Mean You Still Can’t Get Fired For Marijuana

Testing people for cannabis would be problematic at this point, and the chances of companies keeping their jobs will be shockingly slim.

This is because cannabis can stay in your system for up to 90 days (mostly around 30 days or a few weeks if you rarely smoke). This means that someone could have smoked a joint at a birthday party last week and then get fired a week later for “having cannabis in their system”.

Campaign creators photo via Unsplash

If the safer workplace is never tested for impairment, but only for the presence of an actual drug … well, I hate to say America has been betrayed by its politicians.

And that leads us to where we are today, in a limbo that makes companies scratch their heads.

A few things a company can do to keep up with the times

According to ABA, there are a few things that companies can do now from a legal perspective. First, customize different codes based on regions. If you are in a state with stricter laws, you can create “state-specific” clauses.

The other alternative is to simply stop this archaic practice. Perhaps we should judge people not by the content of their urine sample, but by their productivity and character.

Bottom line

At the end of this joint, we’ll wrap it up with a quick reminder that one day you can buy weed in a Seven Eleven. Sure, it won’t be the best bud, but it will do the job.

Cannabis has already arrived in the mainstream zeitgeist. Hell, if Iron Mike Tyson smokes the Cheeba and runs a cannabis farm, you know the people smoked!

Let’s get rid of this intrusive and degrading practice of screening people for drugs. Plus, drugs don’t tell you who a person is. If that’s what you want, just check your browsing history!

This article originally appeared on Cannabis.net and was republished with permission.