Hi! I hope that you don't mind me making a comment. I am a Police Officer and feel that my employers approach to drug testing is naive in the extreme. Whilst I feel that it is abhorrent for anyone in such a position to take an illegal drug, I fear that they will hardly ever catch the persons who do it.
This is because that the cozart drug testing that they use, analyses a swab of saliva which is fine if you have taken drugs VERY recently but they don't seem to realise that most class A drugs metabolise out of your system in as little as seven hours (for opiates) and up to 24hrs for Ecstacy and Cocaine. Cannabis is the worst one, which can last from 7 days to a month (if you are a heavy user). What this means is that if people are daft enough to use cannabis (Class C), then they get caught and booted out but if they use Class 'A' drugs, they will never get caught unless they are a proper addict or get tested after coming back to work straight away after a weekend on a 'bender', which is unlikely as we mainly work shifts and get several days off at a time. They don't even test for LSD.
The goverment also make us drug test people who are arrested for certain 'trigger' offences, presumably for statistical purposes which are very flawed in that not once have I ever seen someone test positive for Opitates, but nearly always for Cocaine. This is not because nobody takes Opiates, it's because the drug is nearly always out of their system at the time of the test. What a waste of time collecting such flawed statistics!!!!
You can test hair samples which remain contaminated for up to six months or maybe more but they don't have a power to take those as far as I know. Also, if you tell them that you have a drug issue (even just before the test) they don't boot you out and instead send you to occupational health (well, so they say but I don't exactly believe them!).
Each week, we get an internal notice which tells you about people who have retired, resigned or been kicked out of the job e.t.c. and how many people do you think have been chucked out for drugs since CDT was introduced?
NIL as far as I know. If someone did get caught for it, they would not be able to resist plastering it all over the intranet. Also, from looking back at the stats, there has been no marked increase in people being kicked out since the CDT was introduced so I can only assume that they simply don't catch anyone as even if it was all low key, the stats would have gone up!
In any case, I know of one guy who tested positive for cannabis and got away with it simply by saying that he "passively smoked" it.
Yeah right
