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Did you know that drug testing doesn't help tech businesses' productivity?
"In a study of high tech industries, researchers found that 'drug testing programs do not succeed in improving productivity. Surprisingly, companies adopting drug testing programs are found to exhibit lower levels of productivity than their counterparts that do not... Both pre-employment and random testing of workers are found to be associated with lower levels of productivity.'"
Source: Shepard, Edward M., and Thomas J. Clifton, Drug Testing and Labor Productivity: Estimates Applying a Production Function Model, Institute of Industrial Relations, Research Paper No. 18, Le Moyne University, Syracuse, NY (1998), p. 1, http://www.drugpolicy.org/library/shepard2.cfm (via theDrugWarFacts.org Drug Testing chapter.)
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Comments
I'm Shocked! Shocked I tell you
For a time in my life I designed and wrote large database applications, systems of programs that performed between tens and hundreds of individual functions, reports, etc. I found that moderate cannabis intake combined with moderate caffeine intake SIGNIFICANTLY increased my productivity. Literally by a factor of 4-5 in terms of lines of clean code that I could produce in a given time frame. Instead of struggling to write 20-30 lines in a day I could breeze through over a hundred. The way cannabis helped was that it made it possible for me to hold the entire project structure in my head and to be able to easily pull my head up out of the details of the subsection I was currently writing and see how it related to the overall system, where it needed to interact and what data was affected. It also made it possible for my subconscious processes to write entire sections of code. I'd simply see the entire path from where I was to where I needed to get in a moment of insight, and then be able to just transcribe the lines of code from memory.
I also took an extensive IQ test after smoking pot daily for thirty years. Over that time my IQ had risen by 9 points. Yeah, I'm really shocked to read of these results.
Tests weed out the best
Possibly the answer is that higher quality recruits resist the implied insult of such tests and companies are left with mediocre yesman types.
as a veteran pot smoker, i
as a veteran pot smoker, i second kbman's position. i find it consistently stimulates thought, perception, and artistic creativity. there are many similar, more lengthy and detailed testimonies on lester grinspoon's site. of course, some people may not agree or share similar experiences, but what gives them the right to impose upon us?
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