Legal pot, coming to Washington state

All Im seeing is a lot of rulings that support my earlier points.

Hi ignored member, are you here to tell me about shoe poo again?

Feeling bad that your links agreed with me?

I've got to agree with Brett here: if a dude keeps showing up to work reeking of bacon and deep fryer grease he has no right to expect his boss to keep him around, he's just a liability.

The whole thing is sort of tangential to the point that what you do on your off hours is none of your employer's business.

We should bar people who look like WoW/Eve players from being employed. It's for their own good.

I think it's probably time that some of the people who don't have Dartwick on ignore (which should be no one, but whatever) report some of these posts. What's the point of having a moderated Debate and Discussion forum if it ends up looking exactly like the Santorum forum anyway? It's pretty clear from the side of the conversation I can see that he's waaaay outside the guidelines Lum set.

Sorry, I admit I didn't read the full thing, I was just responding to the quoted portion.

I wonder how it would interact with pot and legal use of prescription drugs that results in addiction? Does it say, and I have just missed it?

It appears that Gus feels "moderated" means only people who agree should be in the debates.

TBH I don't see how stigmatizing people who are addicted to illegal substances and preventing them from obtaining or retaining gainful employment really helps with the whole, you know, getting them off drugs thing.

It's just a poor approach to a serious social issue.

It's from 2000, so no. Like I been saying, it's difficult to find any actual material on the subject. I'm guessing whatever exists exists in the framework of Federal law with state law providing the gaps through which medical users float.

Frankly I have no trouble with someone being fired for substance use at work, even with an addiction. Especially with an addiction. They need rehab, not work, and the government should pay for it until they can get their shit back together and get back to work in a new job.

This looks to be what the ADA provides.

And this is where Reene's complaint comes in. The ADA as described in this 2000 article or study or what have you linked on the USCCR site. does not allow you to discriminate based on prior use as an addict.

Current use yes. Prior use no.

Current users. Should be. In rehab. If their use impacts their work or occurs at work. If not, fine. Normal people do not use recreational drugs at work. I don't crack open a beer at work. I don't show up to work stoned. I have no problem using either at home, in my own time, without causing work difficulty for myself.

If I _did_ I would have a problem and would need rehab. Not a job, rehab.

I agree on principle but I have to admit I have trouble getting past the 'illegal' part. I would never stigmatize them for the addiction, but I'd almost certainly stigmatize them for flouting the law.

Though I'm a complete hypocrite because I would totally 'flout the law' by having a gay marriage ceremony right in Santorum's face, but this is neither the time nor place.

In all seriousness, it seems that conservatives of a certain bent classify people as "good" or "bad." If you do drugs, you're obviously "bad," and should be kicked out of society completely. It's in line with the mindset that poor people are poor because they're lazy and shiftless, and if they'd just get off their asses they'd be fortune 500 CEOs.

I dont thing anyone wants to stigmatize them.
The potential problems arise if biusiness not being able to fire drug abuses who do bad work(or call off a lot.)

Theres no good way to legally show someone is high on pot at given time. But its easy to show that they have smoked pot in the last month.

Also, people who play slots.

Aeon221, what's the question, exactly?

Oh, I see there's been a lot of activity in the last 40 minutes or so - it may not still be relevant.

Does the ADA provide employment protection for current drug and alcohol users who are addicted to their substance and may or may not use at work?

More specifically, can employers fire them?

I'd have to look at the regs and see how the ADA defines illegal drug use. Under the Fair Housing Act, someone can lose their protection by illegally using or being addicted to a "controlled substance," presumably as defined under the Controlled Substances Act. That could include a drug they were legally prescribed, if that drug is being used illegally or if the person becomes addicted to it.

The ADA coverage probably is going to boil down to two things: 1) Whether the drug the person is addicted to is a "controlled substance," and 2) whether it effects work performance. The ADA and the Fair Housing Act are written and interpreted very similarly (my area of expertise is housing).

You can not fire someone for alcoholism unless they are intoxicated or drink at work. You can fire them for too many call offs etc. as long as you do it before they claim a disability.

Here's the EEOC reg:

Here's the actual statute's mention:

That's interesting.* The ADA would actually cover someone who is addicted to Oxy as long as it was prescribed to him. The Fair Housing Act would not.

* Interesting just to me, probably.

Okay, so that again is more on the illegal use of drugs. Should we assume that means that addictions through legal use of substances are protected? Where does that bit on alcoholism fit in, do you know?

Edit: Oh, you answered my question in an edit. Thanks!

You're my Captain Planet! Thanks for clearing that up jerri!

I think Dartwick's right in that alcoholism, assuming the person is of legal drinking age, does not strip one of coverage under the ADA (same with Fair Housing Act). Presumably an alcoholic could be fired for drinking at work if that's a policy, or for showing up impaired, or for excessive absenteeism. The person could perhaps even request some sort of reasonable accommodation, but I have no idea what that would be. I can't even think of a plausible hypothetical. But I'm sure you guys can. :)

Obesity is a character flaw unless you have hormonal imbalance that makes it not your fault. Heart disease is also your fault if you eat like shit, and don't exercise. The only time I would consider something like that not the person's fault is if they had no control over their contraction of the disease (such as hereditary diseases or other situations where they couldn't be reasonably held accountable). Using reductio ad absurdum to try and disprove me by trying to tell me that by my logic if you get in a car crash it's your fault because you were driving isn't going to change my mind either. In the case of a car crash it's up to the parties involved to decide who was at fault, and it just might be that yes, your injury is indeed your own fault.

Anyways I don't have any problem with state/federal worker's comp programs or with welfare or any of those support systems. What I'm saying is that I'm an employer and I have an employee who has developed an addiction to illicit drugs because he was bored and wanted to take the edge of his/her shitty life with some heroin, I should be fully allowed to fire that person if their own self created problems start negatively affecting me or the company. I also take offense at treating people with addictions that were formed by recreational use as the blameless victims who must be empathized with. I'm sorry, and I wish them the best in their recovery, but their poor decisions and lack of forethought to the impact those decisions might have on their quality of life and how other people view them are their own fault and I see nothing wrong with holding them personally responsible for their decisions.

EDIT: Note that this is for current addicts, not people that sought help and have gotten over it. I wouldn't hold a prior addiction against someone that was dealing with it and functioning normally. Everyone makes mistakes and I would consider seeking help and getting over it to be them admitting they made a mistake and correcting it.

Also grey is not a colour. The world according to Staff Sergeant.

Seriously, what are you saying? If your actions play a part in your disability, it is suddenly all your fault? Can you seriously not see how unrealistic and inconsiderate that is?

Again I'm not advocating that these people lose their access to federal or state provided workers comp or other government support programs. I am simply saying that a company shouldn't have to keep an employee on if their disability is impairing their ability to perform their job and that disability was caused by a poor decision they made. I am also saying that I don't view self inflicted things like recreational drug addiction the same way I would view say, someone who had Parkinson's or leukemia. One person made stupid decisions knowing the risks, and one person is a victim of circumstance. And obviously there are shades in between when it comes to the consequences of obesity and other injuries (I would not consider someone injured in a car crash responsible for their injury unless they were driving impaired or 100% at fault for the crash), I am simply referring to recreational drug users who get addicted and then I'm supposed to consider them a "victim".

Anyways this is a massive tangent to the actual topic and not even related to the actual tangent which is the discussion of welfare laws. This is just my opinion on the matter and doesn't really matter whatsoever.

My ex-employer deciding to stop paying me when I decided to spend 5 years motorcycle touring and hiking instead of working was also inconsiderate I guess.
But it was my choice.

You're making a judgement about the person based on the condition rather than a judgement about the condition and how it impairs their ability to work.

They're very different. You cannot possibly know why someone started taking drugs. It may have been a perfectly rational attempt to self medicate in the face of mental or physical trauma. It may have been an alternative to pain killers that had their own nasty side effects. It may have been any number of things. It may have been that they wanted to get really high all the time. All of which is irrelevant.

The only _knowns_ are the following:
A) that they have a condition
B) it may or may not impair their ability to work on a daily basis

No moral judgement needs to be made. Making one clouds the issue to no point.

From there debate centers on how to provide care, who pays for it and whether they should keep their job. Again, no morality should come into it.

There's a reason for that. Imagine you are a lawmaker with a moral bent writing a law on how addicts should be treated. You write the law to penalize because you believe that these people did it to themselves. That's fine. Many may well have. But your penalizing improperly punishes people who may have a perfectly good and entirely understandable justification for their behavior or addiction. It also removes the ability to make discretionary calls from the trained personnel on the ground. The moral framework with which you view the situation is needlessly constricting their ability to do the first and most important thing: provide appropriate care. You could, of course, write innumerable case by case qualifications. In my view, that's stupid and leads to laws on moose tubbing. And anyway it has the same side effect.

Sure we posters could still moralize all we want because we're not lawmakers. But why do it when it's just clouding things and leading to bad feelings?

You keep changing the term you use in order to avoid seeing the logical flaw in your viewpoint. Diabetes may be your fault, but it's not a character flaw. Obesity may be your fault, but it's not a character flaw. And so on. None of these things are character flaws in & of themselves, addiction included. You might argue that a character flaw led to the condition, but if that's your position: which one? Be specific now. If a person is obese because they got depressed & stopped taking care of themself, what character flaw is that? If they're obese because they were never taught proper nutrition growing up, which character flaw is that? If they're an addict because they got addicted to pain-killers while recovering from a painful surgery or illness, which character flaw is that? And so on.

When you start looking at these diseases in detail, you begin to see that the supposed character flaws that caused them don't exist. It's only when you're lazy & use a broad brush that you see character flaws. "Oh, they're obese because they're lazy." "They're an addict because they're weak-willed." Neither of those statements are commonly true. So long as you're too lazy to learn the actual causes of these diseases, you'll continue to spout naive & silly views. And here's a helpful tip: approaching a new subject with a judgemental attitude is almost guaranteed to keep you ignorant about the subject, even if you *do* get off your lazy ass & try to learn about it.

If that's what you're saying, then I suggest you be quiet until you mature a little & learn how these diseases work. Few, if any, heroin addicts become addicts for the reason you just described.

Because I can only like a post once, I just wanna say Mark Anax just hit a home run.

The Court of Appeal in my jurisdiction recently considered reasonable accommodation in the case of drug addiction in two parallel cases. The first involved a minor who was caught smoking marijuana on company property. The second involved a nurse who was caught stealing pharmaceuticals from work. The Court found that the employer does have a duty to accommodate addicted employees: typically this takes the form of giving the employee the opportunity to attend rehabilitation programs without losing his or her jobs. Basically the employer can't just terminate the employee: the employer has a duty to facilitate rehabilitation.

And I don't see anyone arguing that an employer should be forced to keep a person unable or unwilling to do their job. I see a bunch of people arguing that people with problems, self inflicted or no, should be given a bit of compassion, that their job should be held open for them for after they complete some sort of compulsory rehab.

You're looking at this wrong. Very few Alcoholics drink to excess because they want to or it's "fun." They picked up that first drink because they wanted to, or because it was fun. Most alcoholics literally can't stop because there is something wrong with them. You think that homeless alcoholic on the corner is choosing to live like that? That he can just throw the bottle away and never pick it up and get his life together but he doesn't want to? Cause if you think that then you need to say so.

I thought the actual topic was how stupid random drug testing is?

I'll admit that I was wrong with my first few posts, I was far too broad and judgmental of conditions that I don't really know a whole lot about and my knee-jerk reaction to a drug addict being labelled an innocent victim caused me to jump to a lot of conclusions that I didn't have the right to, and then to try and justify an opinion that was formed based on a lack of information on the subject, and also apparently I had the definition of character flaw wrong. Sorry to all.

Oh and I was very specific to say that I would never consider someone who was addicted to painkillers as a result of a surgery or an injury at fault, by the way. But yes, in the general case I am wrong, I was referring to the very specific case where the person is directly at fault which you say is very uncommon so I guess it's not a useful situation to base one's entire view of addiction on. Sorry for the derail all, I am wrong. Continue on with the actual useful content.

So no one here works in a Right to Work state then? Where none of this matters.

There's too much trolling and not enough of this in this forum. I didn't want to let this go unacknowledged.

Just to be clear on where the discussion started:

Dartwick doesn't actually give a shit if it impairs your job. He wants businesses to be able to fire you for smoking on your own time, even if it doesn't impair you at work. Doesn't matter if you're not addicted. Doesn't matter if you don't smoke at work. If you smoke pot or, for that matter, smoke cigarettes, businesses should be able to fire you.

Apparently now he's arguing that businesses should be able to fire you for smoking pot at work, or going to work high. That's a cute goalpost-shift.

It bothers me when obesity is treated with the "BOOTSTRAPS LAZY FAT PEOPLE" mentality. Quite a lot of factors that go into a person being obese are beyond that person's control, including poverty/socioeconomic status, education, where they live, and how their body specifically metabolizes certain things. It's no coincidence that obesity is a poor person's disease nowadays.

And yeah, dartwick shifted the goalposts. It seems people lost sight of the original thing that sparked the discussion in their hasty effort to demonize addicts.

I've never said I am for drug testing other then in jobs where you are driving/flying or something similar. Those I do think there is a public interest that makes drug testing legal. My only argument has been and still is about what Alex has talked about where a person can show up drunk or high to their job and be protected from being fired. I will always think that exact scenario is wrong that a person is protected.

Aaron made a logic error.

Could you elaborate on the public interest? And why, again, would it matter what a pilot vs. a secretary is doing in their off hours? So long as they're not doing their job while impaired it seems like a nonissue. A pilot going home and getting high after a 10 hour day doesn't really seem to hurt anyone.

If you are flying anywhere between 200-700 people in a plane I think your employer should be able to require random drug testing. Its an area where it would only take once coming in impared to kill a huge number of people.