Professional people on drugs.

[RedneckStumpy]

Over the last month DH has been clearing up incidents at work. All of which have been having to sack people who have caused an incident at work due to drugs.

Druggy 1: Rolled a company vehicle, he was injecting heroin while driving and passed out.

Druggy 2: Sold company phone, laptop then used company credit card to hawk fuel to feed he coke habit.

Guy 3: While being security checked by the nuclear power station, was told to leave and was escorted to the plants property boundary buy armed police.

DH gets drug tested regularly, everyone who works at the company is security cleared. How do these people slip through the net?

Is drug taking becoming more mainstream?

I think many people use them to cope with the stress of life and the stress of work. I work in the NHS and I often say that if the NHS started drug testing their staff they would lose thousands of staff members in a day. It’s the unrealistic expectations. 24 hour shifts for doctors etc. no one can do that without ‘help’

this thread is painting an increasingly bleak looking future. Are we going to reach a point where the workforce is too depressed to work?

There needs to be an overhaul of the drug laws, legalise, regulate and tax, this would then help pay for proper care for serious addicts.

Another issue is that weed can stay in your urine for up to four weeks so users are disproportionately likely to be caught.

Weed's being made legal where I live next month. Whoopee

Should say, all these people I'm talking about that I know are all respectable, professional people

No they are not. They are just pretending to be.

Recreational weed has been legal here for about 5 years. It's going well.

this thread is painting an increasingly bleak looking future. Are we going to reach a point where the workforce is too depressed to work?

I hope so to be honest. Younger people are working in increasingly precarious jobs with fewer and fewer basic rights and benefits to fund a system (pensions, the NHS) that won't exist for them while the richest people in society cream off more and more money, contribute less and less and get richer and richer.

Britain needs a revolution

Should say, all these people I'm talking about that I know are all respectable, professional people

No they are not. They are just pretending to be

@Charolais What I meant was they are all in professional jobs (managers, doctors, academics, solicitors etc.) and they all have a perfectly respectable way of life (few debts, own home, nice kids, etc.)

Heroin isn't really a professional's drug

Have a relative who ran several small businesses and employed many people while using. Clean now because they nearly died but never went down the crime road, other than possession of the smack.

I wholeheartedly agree cannabis should be legal for medical use, but that’s another discussion all together.

What’s Chemsex?

I don’t go out much anymore, but in my younger days I loved a dance and I was astounded to walk into ladies and see three of the girls I was there with doing coke. Apparently everyone does it I don’t and have never tried it but yes I do believe it’s easier than ever to get your hands on all sorts of drugs.

They mostly have totally unrealistic expectations of human beings

I think expecting an employee to drive sober isn't unrealistic.

Where I live, there are a fair few people in a relatively high socio economic bracket taking coke regularly. That’s what I’ve heard in any case.

Britain needs a revolution

what form will this revolution take?

If it's a wee test, you just have a container of someone else's and give that in.

Here it's become pretty standard to check the temperature of the sample as soon as it's handed over. If it's not within a few degrees of normal body temperature it's rejected. Or they have someone of the same sex watch you produce it.

what form will this revolution take?

I was wondering that myself. There are a lot of countries I'd put much higher on that list - Venezuela, for example.

Weed's being made legal where I live next month.

It’s legal in my state too, however employers can still test you and sack you for being high, no different to drinking on the job.

more than that no one is doing 9-5 with an hour for lunch and a short commute either side these days. I think a lot of people find it hard to cope being out of the house from 7:30 to 8:00 every day, and being expected to work hard and look like they care

This.

Huge swathes of society are overworked, overwhelmed and underpaid.

It's only going to get worse as current teens and 20somethings continue to earn nowhere near enough to be fully functioning independant adults but have spare disposable cash on hand whilst trapped living with parents or in rented rooms.

I worked in a 'naice' family pub, you wouldn't believe the number of people who do coke during the daytime, let alone in the evening. We've found needles in the toilets, countless baggies and surfaces still covered in coke. People with a single powdered nostril just walking around oblivious. Also worked in a nightclub, needless to say there were A LOT of drugs around, my managers confiscated what they caught people with, then offered it round to us at the end of the shift.

I'm in my twenties and I don't think I know any peers who don't do drugs of one form or another, life is pretty bleak when security of housing and jobs is so uncertain, I understand why people want to blank it out somehow.

"I don't really care about weed tbh. It makes people lazy but less of a problem to society than alcohol" even IF it was 'just' the laziness that IS a problem to society. Plus it's really not the 'harmless' drug so many claim. It's stronger than it was in the past and we now know it can have serious effects on mh.

However, I agree that alcohol is more problematic than many will admit too.

I'm from a family that on one side is stuffed full of addicts, I've also lost someone very dear to me to drug addiction.

I've no time for anyone that regularly takes illegal drugs. I agree it is becoming more prevalent in society in general but there are still people like me who have never and would never dream of touching them! I barely drink!

Among my friends none of them are regular users. I have one friend who has a rare medical condition where one of the issues is bone pain, notoriously hard to treat. She occasionally uses weed if it's really bad, but I'm talking maybe 2/3 times a YEAR when her pain is unbearable. The rest a few tried weed when younger but other than that don't use at all. There's not even many cigarette smokers. A few drink more than is strictly healthy, but are self aware and as we're getting older are cutting down as they're finding they can't tolerate as well.

Where I live is very well known for having major drug issues. Just walking through town you'll regularly see people who've had to have limbs amputated through drug use yet still begging or using the pawn shops to get money for drugs. Police have their work cut out with regular raids etc I hate it here (long story in how I ended up here it wasn't really a choice. Basically parents home town but it's changed a lot since they were kids here).

I think govt strategies are clearly not working. I personally think treating users as patients rather than criminals would make more sense - not because I think they're undeserving of a criminal record! But because that stance clearly isn't working and getting them OFF the drugs permanently is really the only way you'll get them not committing crimes to feed their habit. But govts see that as 'too expensive' because as with all govts they're only looking a parliament term ahead! Short term possibly more expensive, long term more than likely cheaper than letting the same people get deeper in, commit more crime, spend more time in prison etc.

I also think we need scare tactics to put kids off trying drugs in the first place!

I was able to truthfully tell dd of seeing that person I loved slowly dying as a result of drugs, I was also able (with the person and their parents permission - indeed encouragement) to show her photos and video of what it had done to them - it ain't pretty and it definitely ain't glamorous! I honestly think we need to go back to showing kids what drug addiction REALLY looks like. This person weighed 5.5st at the end, had hepatitis, no hair, withered limbs...

When I was school age I and a group of my friends were shown a video of former addicts telling the harsh truth about addiction, inc pics and video of them when they were in the depths of it. Stories of them soiling themselves in public, waking in pools of vomit, flashbacks causing them to do really dangerous things like trying to sandpaper off imaginary blemishes or dig insects out of their skin...

I do also think too much is being expected of people. Here in uk our working hours are among the longest in Europe, govt and employers need to rather than expect people to work stupid hours, employ more people (which would of course also help employment stats and reduce benefits costs - but as we're currently under a Tory govt which is basically run by business owners it won't happen!)

"If the drug epidemic in any way threatened the wealth and lifestyle of the 1%, it'd have been dealt with." Absolutely!

Catching babies - yes always been a particular issue among medics because they (wrongly) often think their medical knowledge means they know how to handle it!

"Britain needs a revolution" yep! And not just because of this!

I agree with this. A few friends of mine are high flying professionals with nice houses, cars, lovely children etc. Rather than ordering a takeaway on a Friday night or enjoying a glass of wine, they are all snorting coke to “unwind” after a stressful week. It all started with occasional use on nights out, which then developed in to a monthly “treat”... now it’s fridays and Saturdays and keeping a stash at home in case they need a bit in the week. It’s scary really to see them become more and more dependent in such a short space of time and listening to them make up more and more excuses to buy more/take it more and more frequently.

All of them are totally in denial about their worsening addictions, it’s very sad to watch it happen

As I was walking into work yesterday just outside the building there were some people kneeling down in the car park with like a little mat and there were drugs on it and they seemed to be doing something ( dividing it up or something/ ). I was really shocked this was 9am in a busy city centre. everywhere in our suburban village there is the whiff of weed coming from houses, cars, people sitting o park benches etc. Thee are also those little cannisters everywhere ( ? laughing gas/ nitrous oxide). On every street corner there are piles of 10+ cannisters. makes me very worried for my kids

I used to work for a very big, well known telecommunications company. Head office in London. EVERYONE (including me occasionally) was on cocaine. I never did it at work, but if was well known that 90% of the staff were sneaking off at lunch to do lines in the toilet. It was a very high powered, high pressure environment and people seemed to rely on it to get through the day almost. There were 50 year old fathers who were on £500k+ snorting it non stop. Never known anything quite like it!

The normalising of cocaine worries me. My eldest dc has just entered a city professional job, and the reports,of business taking cocaine concerns me. He’s never shown any itnenrest in drugs, to date, but you never know what pressures he may meet, etc

Oh, and forgot to add. There were smaller offices/call centres dotted around the UK where drugs were so heavily frowned upon they sent in sniffer dogs and sacked anybody on the spot who was found at work with drugs! Just found it hilarious that the men making the decision to make the call centres a drug free zone were off to the loos for a quick line in between making these decisions!