Just Say Uh-Oh to Drug Testing

Drug testing in the workplace is a bad idea, and it isn't hard to see why.

America's legal work force totals about 120 million from street sweepers to CEO's. The expense of medical care being what it is, let's say each bread-winner only takes a urine test once a year. Evenly proportion the burden and you'll discover 120,000,000 divided by 365 equals 328,767 little yellow cups safeguarded by mailboxes each and every day.

It doesn't take a psychic to predict that the indignity of toting that many liquid test results will finally push disgruntled postal workers past the edge. When they pool their ammo and prepare to strike back against their oppressors, the President will look up from his intern and call out the National Guard.

The only problem is that the 800,000 angry employees of the United States Postal Service (USPS) just about double the number of supposed saviors in the National Guard. In fact, with a huge fleet of cars, trucks and planes, massive warehouses and even-more-massive cash supplies, as well as daily access to every home in the country, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor Rambo is going to stay these couriers from wiping the floor with the rest of us.

Couldn't happen, says the skeptic. Not as long as the Army (480,000 strong), Navy (372,000), Air Force (361,000) and Marines (172,000) have the National Guard's back. Surely 1,385,000 G.I. Joes and Janes can outmaneuver less than a million P.O.'d USPS Petes and Pams?

Surely. Except that it's mighty hard to outmaneuver from China.

Not to belabor the painfully obvious, but when the Postmaster General leads the coup d'tat (they don't call him the Postmaster Pacifist, do they?) the Chinese government will surely seize on our moment of weakness to settle a few scores. Let's face facts: we sent "peacekeeping" battle groups to their missile tests near Taiwan; we "accidentally" bombed their embassy in Belgrade; we imported the "new, improved" Windows 2000 operating system to their country. As far as they'll consider the matter, we asked for it.

At this point, we'll be fighting a full-scale war at home and abroad. We won't be able to mobilize our supplies because the USPS will control both land and air and it's tough to e-mail a humvee. We won't be able to mobilize our troops because China's entry into the fray will give them a billion person edge in any game of Last Man Standing. About all we will be able to mobilize is our white flags, which we will then valiantly wave until the shelling stops.

Game over. We lose. Roughly following the precedent of Portugal and Spain's Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, China and the Postal Service will partition their conquered territory with an imaginary line through Omaha, Nebraska. The People's Republic will claim everything east of the line and the Postmaster General everything to the west.

In short order, Worker's Vanguard will outsell the Wall Street Journal in the Big Apple and stamp machines will replace slot machines in Vegas. Communist banners will go up as Confederate flags go down in South Carolina and dogs will be banned for life from front yards in California. New Hampshire convicts will stamp "Mao was Right, We Were Wrong" instead of "Live Free or Die" on state license plates and Oregon students will wear USPS uniforms to school, carry books from class to class in mail sacks and call for a ride home from thirty-three cent pay phones. Only a scattered band of resistors will remain of the once-mighty U.S. of A.

That's where Utah comes in.

At present, the population of China is approximately 1,250,000,000 and the number of Mormons worldwide is a mere 10,500,000. Assume, however, that China's communist cadres continue their country's policy of zero population growth while The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps garnering converts and encouraging large families to the tune of, say, five percent expansion a year. By 2099, Mormons will outnumber Chinese by a healthy margin of 65,012,578 men, women and children.

Quarterbacked by Steve Young VII in the east, our Mormon comrades will push the Chinese overlords so far downfield they'll be back across the North Pacific in no time. Meanwhile, the descendants of former Federal Express and United Parcel Service agents will swarm every zip code west of Omaha to deliver defeat to the dreaded USPS--overnight guaranteed.

Okay--so chances are that everything will work out all right in the end. But when it comes to an issue as important as drug testing in the workplace, do we really want to leave our future to chance?

Jeremy N. Smith '00 is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.