ORDINANCE ONLY AS STRONG AS ENFORCEMENT

While her husband was president, Nancy Reagan spent her years in the White
House traveling the country talking about a number of issues. The one which
tends to stick out in the minds of most is the "Just Say No" campaign. It's
still around today, only each year more and more are saying yes instead of no.

We live in days when a drug policy is as important as a 401K plan or health
insurance. The argument raised around the country tends to be that random
drug testing or mandatory drug testing on employees is an invasion of
privacy. More often than not, it's the people most worried about
potentially failing such a test which complain about it.

Jemison is one step closer to its new policy, and while it is too long to
go into here, it's not unlike many others in Chilton County.

More than anything, the city of Jemison is making the statement that it
wants to hold its employees to a higher standard. Jemison wants to make
certain that its employees are safe as are the people those employees are
working around.

Congratulations, Jemison for doing the right thing and taking a stand. Now,
the real test will come when you have to apply those standards to a
situation in which an employee breaks the rules.

How do you respond Kenneth Ray, when Joe Shmoh the tractor driver does a
line or two of crack, hops on the back hoe and plows through the new lobby
at Regions Bank?Hopefully it doesn't come to that. Hopefully this new drug
policy will take care of problems before they manifest themselves in some
catastrophic way. Yet, the town must adhere to the guidelines established
in the drug policy, and not let an employee slide through something just
because he's a first cousin twice removed or somebody's best friend.

Not saying Jemison would do that, but there are a lot of municipalities
which do. Also, there are a lot of smart drug-addicts in the world today
who continue to discover new and more unbelievable ways of masking results.
While many drug tests can determine when a person has tried to mask
results, it's not always that clear.

Consequently, the occasional drug user slides right through a test. All the
drug policies in the world can't take the place of knowing the people who
work for you. Consequently, as good as this new policy is, it can't stand
alone. People in positions of responsibility must use common sense and pay
attention to the people who work under them. Drug use will manifest itself
in obvious ways...ways that can be hidden from a test, but can't be hidden
from the human eye. That doesn't mean assume every person on the pay-roll
is a drug-user and should be treated as such. It simply means that
employers can no longer hire someone and let them go about their business
without giving it a second thought.

There must be attention paid to employees, how they act and how they look
more now than ever before. Watching and listening, most of the time, will
uncover as many problems as testing will. Also, a policy not adhered to is
not worth the paper it is printed on.