One of the companies my father owned, he one day went to see something at the police station, and saw open book of wanted criminals, and found half of his employees there, and all of them were in the same criminal group, while inside the company they behaved like if they did not knew each other until they met at the workplace...
But probably I would refuse to take a drug test too. But sometimes companies are between a rock and a hard place.
In a functional working environment, if someone shows up incapacitated, you would show him the door there and then. But in the dysfunctional environment that we are in, if someone shows up incapacitated and kills someone, the company can point to the drug test, claim that they have taken due care when hiring and are off the hook. This needs to stop.
Had a boss that got drunk every single day at work. He didn't hide it too much. During sit down meetings in his office, I'd sometimes catch a glimpse of his garbage can which was brimming with empty Coors lite cans. In the evenings, he often offered me a beer and I occasionally accepted. Ironically, he was the most productive , brilliant engineer to cross my path. Management never showed him the door. Eventually, he checked himself into rehab and I think there was a happy ending.
I have heard a similar story from an HR consultant, minus the whole "criminal" element. It far less likely at a public company but think of something like a call center or factory, a smallish business, ~30-100 employees, where the owner has hired managers running it. If someone devious gets in a position of hiring power they use favoritism and undisclosed relationships to build a fiefdom. It might not go as far as stealing money, but they could be creating extra jobs for their friends and fobbing the actual work off to underlings, basically just freeloading off the business. If the owner doesn't know the clique exists it could be hard to see the signs.
I'm pretty far OT here WRT drug testing, but anyway a good HR department should be more than a cover-your-ass paperwork machine.
Yes, the business was a small factory, I think it was about 25 employees.
My father distanced himself a bit from management at the time, since he is the tech guy (he invented all the machines that the factory manufactured), and management was happy to hire locals, so many employees were hired off the street (ie: random unemployed people that reached the door and asked to do blue collar job)
One of the companies my father owned, he one day went to see something at the police station, and saw open book of wanted criminals, and found half of his employees there, and all of them were in the same criminal group, while inside the company they behaved like if they did not knew each other until they met at the workplace...
But probably I would refuse to take a drug test too. But sometimes companies are between a rock and a hard place.