My Back Hurts -- Pass Me One of Your Vicodins Please

If you're taking illegal drugs at work, and test positive on a random drug test, you'll be fired. What if you're taking prescribed drugs for pain or anxiety?

Should you be fired for testing positive for those prescription painkillers?

It's actually a more complicated issue than it might sound.

What if you're taking prescription painkillers so that you can get back to work? What if you're taking painkillers as a result of injuries sustained on the job? What if you're taking a painkiller that was prescribed to one of your colleagues, who offered you one of his pills because your back hurts, and you forgot to bring your medication with you? What if ...

I'll stop here -- there are endless variations possible, but you get the picture.

Katie Zezima and Abby Goodnough have a long article in today's New York Times about how prescription drug testing may pose a new kind of "quandary" for employers, some twenty years "after the Supreme Court first upheld the right to test for drugs in the workplace."

It used to be that companies only tested for illegal drugs, but more and more companies are testing for prescription painkillers, anxiety medication, and more.

In one example in the Times story, a 22-year employee (not a 22-year-old, but someone who had been with the company for 22 years) was fired for taking a medication which had been prescribed by her doctor for back pain because she had tested positive for that drug, which the company, "which makes car parts, had suddenly deemed unsafe."

Now trimming car window molding, which was this woman's job, is not an office job. There is far more dangerous equipment around the factory floor than staplers. Employees may be working in closer proximity than the next cubicle, and if someone on the line has an accident or is impaired, there is substantial risk to those nearby. (Note: this particular employee is suing for discrimination and invasion of privacy, and her company would not comment for the article, citing the ongoing lawsuit.)

But how impaired is too impaired? In this tough economy, a lot of people who have jobs will do anything to keep those jobs. If it means popping a bunch of pain pills to keep working on the line, they will do that.

The employee who was fired said that "she understood [the company's] safety concerns but believed the company should have worked with employees who take prescription drugs rather than fire them. She said,

If the medicine they're taking is not good for them or the workplace, then there should be some sort of program where they can teach us how that affects you or see if something can be worked out. But that was not an option for us.

The automotive parts manufacturer decided that it wanted to "provide a safe environment" and would consider all drugs "unsafe if its label included a warning against driving or operating machinery, but doctors say many users function normally despite such warnings."

I can understand that the manufacturer preferred to have a blanket policy: All drugs of this type will be banned. Such a policy is easier to explain, easier to administer, and should be easier to defend in a court of law (although we'll have to wait and see whether it can be successfully defended). But is it ethically better?

In general, I don't like hard-and-fast rules for how to treat people because people themselves aren't "hard and fast". Some people respond better to "carrots" and some react better to "sticks". In the case of medications, different people react to different medications differently. Some people get "up" on "downers"; some people get slow and logy on "uppers".

Moreover, the Times article points out that setting rules about prescription drug use at work can easily run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act which "prohibits asking employees about prescription drugs unless workers are seen acting in a way that compromises safety or suggests they cannot perform their job for medical reasons."

Other employees at the plant said in interviews that there were some people there who used illegal drugs, and that some passed around prescription drugs (along the lines of, "Sorry, I don't have any Tylenol for your headache, but I'll give you one of my OxyContins.").

With an employee who has been working for you for 22 years -- assuming you're really worried about line safety ... don't you think you could have found a different, non-line position for her?

I wouldn't mind a "no illegal drugs" blanket rule, and I wouldn't mind a "no prescription drug sharing" blanket rule. But firing people for using a properly-prescribed drug properly, without any evidence that it's affecting their ability to perform their job?

That's going too far.