Nathan Deal has a plan. You see, too many businesses in Georgia are struggling to get competent applicants to fill their jobs. Governor Deal believes this is in a large part due to drug testing. On this point I agree. From there, Governor Deal not only derails but runs his train of thought clear off the rail system entirely.

You see, Nathan Deal’s plan to increase the pool of qualified workers is not something logical, like say legalizing cannabis and recommending the removal of THC tests from drug tests. Nathan Deal’s incredible plan is to offer “incentives” (money) to private employers to “notify” state officials when job applicants fail drug tests. From there, the plan gets a bit vague. However, what we do know is that Governor Deal would like to get the Department of Behavioral Health involved. The federal Department of Labor was also mentioned in Governor Deal’s remarks.

This problem is nothing new for employers. Even FBI Director James Comey has stated “I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals [in China] and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview.”

You see, the solution is not to involve the government further into the affairs of private citizens, and it certainly is not to create a system where the state of Georgia is paying businesses to turn over applicants who have failed drug screens so that they may be forced into a bureaucratic nightmare of “drug treatment”. Workplace drug policy is actually quite simple from a business perspective. If you cannot tell that your employee is using drugs by their behavior in the workplace, then why does it matter?

Nathan Deal is absolutely ignoring the root cause of the issue, the same way he did while championing criminal justice reform. The problem being addressed here is not “too many people use drugs (see: marijuana) therefore we must help them!” the problem is “too many businesses are scaring away potentially valuable employees due to the fear of being drug screened for a substance that doesn’t affect their behavior in a notable way”.

Maybe the latter is where we should focus our energies Governor Deal, not the former. I’m sure a loophole in the tax code to allow Nathan Deal to pass along yet another tax break to big business isn’t behind this at all. I also truly need to see about getting a sarcasm key installed on my laptop.