Pissing on Freedom

It's fair to say that Americans are far more adept at preaching freedom than practicing it. In all manner of ways, Americans routinely surrender freedoms and liberties and expect their fellow citizens to do the same. The tired and moronic refrain is inevitably: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide".

This refrain, of course, is a surrender to the power of the state, in that it assumes that a) the state has the right to distinguish "wrong" personal behavior, and b) the state would never do "wrong" itself and is therefore the legitimate judge of all that is "right". Two very pre-1776 assumptions.

Drug tests are a perfect case-in-point. Most people support drug testing because they think they would pass the test. Their thought stops at that point. This logic would also allow us to round up Jews, because most of us aren't Jews. But that's beside the point.

The point is that drug tests are a widely-practiced police-state measure that tramples on the 4th and 5th amendments by their very nature.

But first, we must distinguish what drug tests are. Drug tests are, for all intents and purposes, marijuana tests. Since any thinking person will admit that alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug in any and every workplace, the absurdity is obvious.

I used to work in a warehouse with forklifts and tractor-trailers whizzing by all day and all night. The "drug" policy there did not prevent men from coming to work drunk and driving industrial equipment around all night (which some men did), but it DID prevent me from smoking a joint on the weekend.

So, since drug tests focus primarily on the most benign drug in our pharmacopoeia, while completely ignoring a drug whose use could injure or kill workers in any number of ways and in any number of workplaces, the mental decrepitude of the policy is obvious.

Now, for the constitution. The 4th amendment prohibits arbitrary search and seizure. Put simply, nobody can search my person or my property without documented reasoning that I have committed a crime. You can search me if I am fleeing from the direction of a recent armed robbery, but you cannot search me if you simply dislike the way I dress.

But drug tests require no proof, no evidence, no reasoning at all. There is no supposition that the testee has committed any crime, or has ever used a drug in his life, legal or otherwise. No, the only thing that makes a drug testee "suspicious" is that he wants a job.

So, if you want a job in this country, you have to prove that you have not violated the state's (idiotic and ignorant) drug policies. Wanting a job is probable cause. And all of a sudden, citizens have no rights and it is incumbent upon them to prove that they have not done something "wrong" rather than it being incumbent upon the state to prove that they have done something "wrong".

And here is where all the proto-fascists chime in: "well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about", and its insidious cousin, "well, if you're under suspicion, you must have done something wrong".

And what of the 5th amendment? The 5th amendment, among other things, tells us that no citizen can be forced to provide evidence against themselves. Drug testing shreds this amendment just as surely as it does the 4th.

Requiring a drug test of a job applicant means that a business is forcing that person to provide evidence against themselves. Even if that person has done nothing "wrong", they are forced to submit to a search and forced to provide evidence proving they have done nothing "wrong".

This is not just a problem for stoners, and not only scumbags have reason to fear it. It is just a piece of the architecture that American government and corporations have erected together, making most workplaces into places where the constitution simply does not apply.

It is all part of an edifice of intimidation that has been erected to deprive the American worker of his dignity and his self-worth. You want a job at Wal-Mart? That's fine, just promise you'll never form a union, you'll work unpaid overtime, you'll skip breaks, and you'll pee into a cup upon our request.

There used to be a time in this country when workers had a sense of their rights and were utterly and entirely unapologetic about telling management to piss off. I'll smoke to that.