Drug Abuse

Many organizations consider pre-employment drug screening as an effective strategy to save their workplace from unwanted conflicts due to the drug abusers. Pre-employment drug screening is a proactive measure companies take to maintain high productivity environment. It helps them to make the workplace safer, and their employees free from frequent sick leaves and to prevent drug abuse on the job.

The Advantages of Pre-Employment Drug Screens

Pre-employment drug testing has many advantages.

o Pre-employment drug testing helps organizations to check drug-abuse habits of the job applicants. Thus, it helps them to avoid hiring people with habit of frequent drug abuse. o Pre-employment drug testing not only helps organizations to create a safer and drug-free workplace but also reduces or avoids their chances of handling any future conflicts due to the drug abused employees in their organization. These conflicts include workplace violence or accidents, health benefit utilization and costs, lowered productivity, high insurance premiums, and frequent health-related absences. o The pre-employment drug-screening program in an organization also has an ample potential to drive the drug abusers away from applying in it. This can be very helpful for small and medium businesses where drug abusers are more likely to apply, as they don’t need to invest much of their time and money on such applicants.

Drawbacks of pre-employment drug screens

Though pre-employment drug screening has many advantages, there are some issues associated with it.

o The major drawback of drug screening is its sample collection process where job applicants are likely to feel violation of their privacy. This increases the hassle for organizations of handling the screening more sensitively. o Some drugs such as marijuana remain detectable for up to three weeks after their usage. Some other drugs such as cocaine might remain only for few hours after usage. Thus, making a hiring decision based on these results requires much caution as it may affect the career of a job applicant. o There are some possibilities of prescription-drugs affecting the drug-testing results. Organizations discriminating a job applicant based on the prescription drug-abuse could be violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Some latest advances in medical testing have resulted in evolvement of certain drug-screening products, which are easy to monitor, adulteration proof, affordable, and provide instant and reliable results. These enable organizations to conduct pre-employment drug-screening effectively, with a decreased potential of drawbacks.

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