Making Drug Testing Inconvenient

I'm not subject to random drug testing at work.  Or much of anywhere else, for that matter.  (Well, I suspect the Red Cross screens my donations for drugs along with  everything else, but that's not random.)

I've always said if my employer started a policy of random drug testing, I'd start baking cookies for everyone.  Chocolate chip poppyseed cookies are absolutely delicious, especially if I use the canned poppy seed filling from the Jewish section of the market.   Now, culinary poppy seeds are P. somniferum, or opium poppy. They give the best flavor.  So everyone who eats more than a quarter of a cookie tests positive on the next drug screening.

Now, over at Reason's Hit and Run blog, Jacob Sullum reports on a man who drank some tea and lost his job after a drug screening.

We recently received a letter from a reader who says he lost his job as a truck driver for a trash and recycling company where he had worked for more than two decades because he tested positive for cocaine in a random drug screen after inadvertently consuming some of his wife's coca tea. He notes that the Department of Transportation's drug testing guidelines (PDF) specify that "consumption of coca teas" should not be accepted "as a basis for verifying a cocaine test result as negative." Far be it from me to defend the ridiculous drug testing policies that have been foisted on employers by the federal government, which in this case (as in many others) led to a patently unfair result for an employee who posed no threat to anyone. But the rule regarding coca tea makes sense from a prohibitionist perspective. 

According to a 1996 study reported in Forensic Science International, "the consumption of a single cup of Peruvian or Bolivian coca tea produces positive drug test results for cocaine metabolites." The reason is straightforward: Coca tea contains cocaine; coca is where cocaine comes from. So this is not, strictly speaking, a "false positive." Since coca leaf, like cocaine, is a Schedule II substance, coca tea is illegal in the United States, although you can buy it online and customs agents often let it through. It is not safe to assume that the leaf in these teas, like the leaf used to flavor Coca-Cola, has been "decocainized," and distributors are cagey on this point.

I wonder what kind of flavor it would give to cookies...