bcb@hhb.UUCP (Bob BField) (03/11/86)
:-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) I recently heard on some AM news station that Our Friend E.D.S. conducts drug testing on some employees. This shows us just what kind of company concerns itself with such victimless crimes as the use of illegal substances. Another observation: Spalding Gray wrote in _Swimming to Cambodia_ of a conversation he had with a nuclear missile launcher. The button-pusher admitted to doing blue-flake cocaine because the Navy tests for marijuana, but not cocaine. Even though he toots on the job, he's always ready to nuke those ruskies back to the stone age. He's looking forward to it. The thing drug-free people don't understand about this new fanaticism to test for drugs, is that it resembles the way we behaved toward former members of the Communist Party during the 50's. Note how professional athletes must fess-up to their sins in public, denounce drugs, agree to future testing. Oh, what a day for an auto-da-fe'!* In the 50's, Hollywood communists had to publicly admit their Party membership, denounce the Communist Party as a National Security Threat, and prove their loyalty to America by naming fellow members (even though the F.B.I. had all the names). Does anyone remember Nancy's War-on-Drugs? She traveled around the country and the globe lecturing audiences on how drugs are bad. Does anyone remember those by-gone days when her husband, acting as President of the Screen Actor's Guild, told the public that the Guild would not participate in blacklisting? Of course, Guild members were required to have their names cleared with the American Foreign Legion as a simple, painless loyalty check. By this logic, our Acting President may soon decree that drug testing is an intolerable invasion of privacy, an unwarranted personal search, but that urinalysis is a good idea to ensure a healthy American workforce. I should not simplify this complicated issue. After all, Professional Sports is house-cleaning to improve its tarnished image. Drugs abounded among professional athletes for quite some time. News coverage of it is recent. Were it not for the Drug Scandal, testing would not be the problem that it is becoming. Another observation: Drug testing punishes drug users, not pushers. People who blow a joint, snort some lines, drop a pill, or down a shot every now and then do not damage our social fabric. People who abuse grass, cocaine, speed, alcohol to the point that it affects the way they function at work, do not damage our social fabric either. They are the rent in our social fabric that we wish to mend. Punishing severe drug abusers pushes them to more extensive abuse. They have more to escape from. We have a serious drug problem in America. Impoverished teenagers turn to drugs to escape their miserable lives. Drug abuse drags them down further. These are drugs' worst victims. Employers don't suffer from these abusers because these abusers are unemployed. They live in abandoned buildings, on streets, in pestilent tenements. They steal to support their habits. Punishing these hard-core abusers will not make the problem disappear. Nancy would like to solve the Drug Problem, but all she can do is stand before an audience to speak her mind. She is unable to stop the flow of drugs and alcohol. In the interim, her husband wants us taxpayers to help out Miami drug smugglers who seek to invade Nicaragua and Cuba. The Cuban Mafia adores his vicious anti-communism. Providing a promising future for poor teenagers would help. Reducing stress in the workplace would help. (I wonder how many EDS recruits are driven to drink. :-) Such remedies are out of the question because they are commie-inspired. American employers have the God-given right to rule with Authority. Poor Americans are poor because they are lazy. They don't want to work. Americanism is a sickness behind a sickness. Drug testing is a latter-day McCarthyism. Like its predecessor, it will cause much pain, suffering, drug and alcohol abuse before we really put our feet down to end it. Already, folks such as Keith Hernandez are afraid of standing up against testing because they fear that they will appear "soft on drugs". Think about this (I know not the source): A German reminisced that when the Nazi's took away the Communists and Socialists he didn't speak up because he was neither. When they came for the Jews, he didn't speak up because he wasn't Jewish. When they came for the Catholic and Protestant Clergy, he didn't speak up because he was neither. When they finally came for him, there was nobody left to speak up. _ Bob B-Field P.S. My employers do not test for drugs. If they did, there would be an exodus of the best and brightest. * An auto-da-fe' is an Inquisition witch trial (literally 'act-of-faith'). :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) :-( :-) These wandering opinions are purely my own. They do not reflect my employers in any way.
bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) (03/15/86)
Ok, I'll throw my 2c in. The first thing that always of course needs to be made clear is that to oppose things like urinalysis by employers is not equivalent to condoning drug use, as much as proponents like to cast a wry smile and say "yeah, sure pal". There was a recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which I would like to paraphrase and relate to this. The basic thesis was that there is a vigorous effort in this country to shift certain problems into morally righteous issues. An example they give is Reagan's attempt to involve the military in suppressing drug smuggling. His reasoning was (according to the article, I don't have primary sources) that drugs being smuggled across our border indicates insecure borders, that our national territoriality is being violated, and securing those borders, being a national security issue, is within the purvue of the military. Similar reasoning in regards illegal aliens. Similarly, one can see a shift on this issue at hand from the drug pusher to the drug user, the reasoning is that job performance and hence both national productivity (the selfish interest of the govt to allow this testing to be done) and the rights of the employer (the altruistic interest of the govt to allow this testing to be done) are at stake. The problem in this case is that rather than reviewing an employee's productivity based upon expectations, this is allowing the employer to presume guilt and test the employee on the basis that whatever the employees performance is it 'could' have been better, or perhaps as a predictor of the employee's inevitable (?) degeneration a priori. This is questionable. It smacks (excuse the pun) of locking someone away because the appear to be a 'criminal' type, or are likely to commit a crime (only auto-insurance companies are allowed to do this sort of thing :-) It is clear that the employer's interest here IS IN NO WAY the fact that the employee might be committing a crime off-hours as the intention is simply to fire the employee, not accuse them of a crime and allow them their day in court. I think if I had an employer who tried to subject me to drug testing I would get a lawyer and ask them first to sign a document that would state something like: a) If they find evidence that would lead them to my dismissal, the must also file a criminal complaint against me and commit themselves to serving as a witness on the state's behalf. b) That they understand that depending upon the outcome of that criminal case, if I were found innocent by a court of law not only would I have the choice of being re-instated, but they would be liable to all guaranteed rights by me to pursue remuneration for wrongful accusation. If I were found guilty then obviously the loss of the job and the sentance imposed upon me by the court would be my burden to bear. The problem with this testing thing is that there is no risk on the part of the employer for their invasion of rights and accusations (and damage.) It should be there. -Barry Shein, Boston University
gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (03/16/86)
Many of the best software and hardware people I've worked with have
been drug users. Some of them have been drug abusers. Some of them
have used no pleasure drugs (non-medical) at all. Whether they used
drugs seemed to have no relationship to whether they did a good job,
were moral, etc. I knew one manager who brought a 6-pack of beer to
his interview and drank it during the interview. He was hired. I
worked for him. He taught me a hell of a lot of good things and never
let his addiction interfere with his work (or vice verse). In the same
company (not Sun) a kilo of pot was brought to work one evening to
weigh it out and break it down into pounds and 1/2 pounds for the
various employees who had chipped in to buy it. (This was in the days
when ordinary mortals could *afford* to buy a pound of dope :-) Of
course they closed the door of the office, so it was OK. This company
also had a nationwide secure mail system (which Unix has never had, as
far as I can tell), and it was used for cross-country drug dealing.
On the other hand, one straight-arrow I worked with who looked and
acted an awful lot like Clark Kent was in reality Supercoder. However,
he was a pretty bad manager, and ended up trying to fire me for
insubordination because our technical viewpoints disagreed.
People who want to test me for drug usage, psychological factors, hair
length, beardedness, sexual preference, profanity, dress code, or any
other irrelevant factor are unlikely to be much fun to work with anyway.
I'll go my way and they can go theirs.
[OK, OK, I admit it, I *was* pressured to stop wearing skirts to work
by the ex-President of Sun Microsystems, Owen Brown. But, at the time,
he and the rest of the company were figuring out whether they could all
work together. I decided not to rock the boat, stopped wearing
skirts, and stayed with Sun. I later discovered that this incident was
the first major schism between conservative Owen and the more
enlightened founders/managers at Sun, who supported my wearing whatever
I wanted. Owen left some time thereafter and the dress code faded into
oblivion, as Sunny Kirsten so outrageously demonstrated.]
My favorite part of this debate is realizing that organizations which
turn down people for irrelevant reasons will lose both by diverting
their effort from satisfying their customers, and by rejecting people
who would have been better qualified "except for this factor".
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa