Employee Drug Testing and the Problem of Trust

With respect to your employees, there is an unavoidable problem of trust. As Hamlet says in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain… that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5, 105-109). Your problem as an employer is that you are hiring people to come into your workforce, and even with the best of intentions and the most sophisticated of employee background check systems, it is likely that at some point you will make a bad hiring decision. Our job as one of the top employee background check providing services is to do everything that is reasonably possible to minimize the probability that you will make a bad hiring decision. However, even in our industry, there are no guarantees because there is no such thing as perfect information. By working together, however, we can reasonably hope to minimize the probability of you making a bad hiring decision.

Among the most troublesome and difficult problems is drug abuse in our society. While all of us would long for a world in which drugs and alcohol were not abused and in which all persons who have substance abuse problems we’re able to get efficient help from somewhere like Enterhealth, unfortunately that is not the world that we live in today. Only a select few end up receiving that level of care and treatment. You as an employer cannot really absorb the total cost of the drug problem in our society, unfortunately. To this end, therefore, it is important to have a drug testing system as part of your larger employee background check system. Our expert consultants can work with you to inventory what needs are reasonable for your industry, as the needs of different industries vary dramatically. Indeed, some industries require very stringent drug testing similar to something like this 4 panel drug test, whereas others do not.

Employee Drug Testing and the Problem of Trust

Let’s talk, for a moment, about the problem of trust. Again, to return to Shakespeare, he said that a man can smile and smile and still be a villain. What he meant by that, of course, is that some people can be quite deceptive. The good employee can often look at the same as the bad employee. The good employee and the bad employee can actually tell you the same things. The bad employee, and by that we mean an employee who has a drug abuse problem is quite likely to do his or her best to lie to you, and to hide their drug abuse problem. You cannot, unfortunately, take people at their word. And this can even go for employees who have been with you for some years. There is an unavoidable problem of trust when it comes to drug abuse, and it when it comes to the relationship between an employee who has a drug problem and his or her employer. Some employees may look up articles like ‘How to Beat a Drug Test – Health Street‘ to see how they can get around it.

Because of this problem, it is generally a very wise decision to require drug testing at least before every new hire. It is common for many companies to use solution like marquis reagent to help conduct drug tests amongst their staff. This helps identify if anyone is misusing drugs in the workplace. By treating every new hire in the same way, you cast a wide net in order to pre-identify any potential hires who have a drug abuse problem, and you generally abide by common standards of fairness. In certain industries, in addition, you may want to subject your employees to either random or regularly scheduled drug tests, again with the idea of requiring all employees to be drug tested, so that you are fair, and are treating all employees by the same standards of fairness. We are not, of course, attorneys and cannot advise on the legal requirements in terms of drug testing. However, drug testing is often one of the services that we can assist you with as part of a comprehensive employee background check program.

To turn from Shakespeare to American politics, Ronald Reagan once very famously said respect to the Soviet Union, that one should trust but verify (Doveryai, no proveryai in the Russian). In this way, with respect to employee drug testing, you should trust your employees to the full extent that is possible, but you should also verify that you do not have an unseen drug abuse problem. The problem of trust is best mitigated by a systematic and regular program of employee drug testing.