| Dear Letters Editor: An incident at work brought out some interesting information from a well-reputed clinical laboratory. A few mornings ago, a fellow worker, call him Joe, went out to his apartment parking lot to drive his company-owned van to work. On his daily vehicle inspection, he noticed that the passenger side of the van had been scraped by some vehicle. He reported the accident (unwitnessed) to our supervisor, showing him the damage, and the incident was reported to our service center manager. He, in turn contacted our corporate headquarters in Santa Monica. The SCM, a former cop, immediately ordered Joe to go have a drug test. Even though the line of damage from the offending vehicle made a straight line across the body and wheel cover, the SCM determined that Joe had been driving at the time of the incident, even though it would have made a rounded mark on a rolling wheel. When the test results came back as inconclusive, Joe was suspended. While no clear reason or result had been determined on the blood test, Joe's job was in jeopardy. A day or two later, his test revealed a "trace" of marijuana in his blood. Joe explained that he had been at a party a couple of weeks ago, where pot was being consumed by others. Now here's where the interesting part comes in: The testing facility argued back that there was no way for second-hand pot smoke to produce even a trace in the bloodstream. Now, my question is, if that is true, how is it that second-hand cigarette smoke is killing hundreds of thousands of people each year? Is it a special smoke that seeks out the lungs of innocent bystanders, while pot smoke only affects the direct inhaler? While the injustice of the termination of Joe bothers me greatly, I was also quite aggravated by some scientific argument against the hyped claims of the dangers of second-hand smoke by the anti-smoking nazis out there. (I, by the way do NOT smoke.) Larry Rosner, Sdlare@aol.com [Those authoritarians who want to regulate pleasure places as well as work places have a habit of ignoring scientific evidence that refutes their claims. Many scientific journals are so terrified of tobacco hate groups that they publish anti-tobacco studies without peer review so the media can amplify the hysteria and become committed to it before peer-reviewed, but contradictory studies are published. I'm not a smoker either, but I think Proposition 10 should be classified as a hate crime.] |
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