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Here is another interesting side effect to legal pot in CO. I worked for a national distribution company with a warehouse near Denver. We need truck drivers and fork lift operators. We drug test employees nationally in accordance with Corporate Policy.

We cannot find enough employees in CO who can pass the drug test. Warehouse work is hard and turnover is high and we would always be under staffed as the pool of possible employees becomes much smaller in CO with legal pot than in other parts of the country.

We need truck drivers and fork lift operators. We drug test employees nationally in accordance with Corporate Policy.

We cannot find enough employees in CO who can pass the drug test.

If your company tested for alcohol use, they would have an even smaller pool of employees to choose from. Does your company check for LSD usage? Probably not, since it is harder to test for. Your company has chosen, for whatever reason, to institute a particular, rather arbitrary, standard for employment, and now you guys are complaining that you can't find employees?

I used to work for a public agency that had a fair-sized group of guys in maintenance positions, the kind of jobs that require you to do dirty things like snake toilets and what-not, and they weren't particularly well-paid. In a management meeting, the idea of instituting regular drug-testing (aka marijuana testing, because it is really the only drug that can be tested cheaply where the traces aren't out of your system within days) was discussed. I told them, sure, go ahead, but the main pool of people who would take a job like this is going to contain mostly the kind of people who smoke a joint now and then. You're going to have real problems keeping people in those positions (keep in mind that a one-time, initial drug screening was already in place). They decided not to institute the test.

I have known a number of people who have been life-long smokers of pot and still function at a high level in rather high positions of expertise and authority. You'd never know that because they aren't low IQ losers who stumble around stoned in public or otherwise disgrace themselves. People need to remember that the loser "potheads" that you think represent the average marijuana user are actually just losers, period.