Hey, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, I remember when you used to be cool. Back in the day, you’d stay up all night getting toasted, watching Family Guy DVDs and ruling high school students displaying posters with pro-drug messages on school grounds counted as protected speech. Those were good times dude, you were fighting the good fight and smoking the good weed, but you’ve changed man. Now you’re all straight-edge and buttoned down. I thought there was still hope for you man, I really did, but now that you’ve gone and ruled that an employer can refuse to even consider the application of someone who failed a drug test years ago, even if that person is now clean and sober, I don’t even know who you are anymore.
In a two-to-one ruling made right here in San Francisco, Judge Susan Graber, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, was all, “Santiago Lopez, I know you like totally botched a drug test back back in 1997 when you were applying for a longshoreman position with the Pacific Maritime Association, the organization that controls all longshoreman hiring on the West Coast, and then reapplied in 2004 after undergoing treatment and were way miffed when they refused to even consider your application. But sorry bro, the rules which were adopted for safety purposes without objection from the longshoreman’s union, aren’t discriminatory because they don’t single out all former addicts, just ones under the influence of drugs at the time of their test.”
You sound like an L7 square, I hope you know that.
According to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, companies aren’t allowed to share your drug test information with each other. So if you’re worried that the drug test you failed when applying for a job at Goldman Sachs back in the ’80s will come back to haunt you when you apply for that gig working the register at McDonald’s, you can breathe a little easier.
Former stoners looking for someplace to work that’s willing to turn a blind eye to druggy, youthful indiscretions might want to check out the FBI. I hear they’re 420-friendly.
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