W EEKLY EDITION JULY 4, 2018
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Legal Marijuana: Driving the Portable Sanitation Industry Crazy
Part 1 ….. continued
By Karleen Kos, PSAI Executive Director
All of this would present a challenge for employers even if service technicians were falling from heaven –
training and hiring costs are not cheap. In the present environment, though, it presents nightmares. There is a
significant shortage of truck drivers in general, and the headaches that go along with legalized pot only make
the challenge of staffing your company with reliable and competent drivers more difficult.
A recent art icle published by Trucks.com, notes that more trucking co mpanies and commercial driver's license
schools are telling candidates not to fill out applications if they're going to test positive. Even with that caveat,
the article says that failure rates are still as high as 60 percent, according to Greg Fulton, president of the
Colorado Motor Carriers Association. So it is plain that these headaches for drivers' employers are not
imagined and will not be going away any time soon. That's because federal law fo rbids both medical and
recreational consumption of marijuana. Any portable sanitation company with drivers and trucks that fall under
federal Department of Transportation (DOT)/Federal Motor
Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) mandates must ensure
that t heir drivers are clean for that drug – among many – to the
best of their ability. (See a full list of federally prohibited
substances in the DOT handbook on drug and alcohol testing
here .)
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P AGE 2
