Presumably the managerial types are trying to help cultivate a "professional" environment.
Never in a million years would I ask an employee to submit to a drug test
I understand the personal freedoms angle, but I can also sympathize with employers who are tired of discovering that guy they hired last week is actually a raging meth head.
If they are unproductive, look like shit, have poor time management, have mood swings etc then they are a liability to their employer because of those things, not because they "do drugs".
On the other hand if they are productive, are professional, [any other positive attribute] and contribute to their employer, does it matter if they are on drugs at the time?
Granted, I've never meet anyone that are actually functional members of society once they start abusing something like meth, but my point is that employees should be judged purely on their performance in the workplace or how they contribute.
Basically we're talking about low-skilled jobs that always have plenty of applicants, filtering a bit too many people isn't that big of a deal when there're still plenty of others remaining afterwards.
It's just a cheap initial filter, as long as it's better than completely arbitrary it's probably beneficial to have.
So you would get a positive reading from somebody who went to a party 2 weekends ago and took a couple of hits from a joint.
On topic: I think that if you're looking for a cost effective way to live, do what someone said earlier and move to a less prominent neighborhood. This seems like it would be more along the lines of "fun to do for a couple weeks".
Do you disagree that this is the case?
Someone can go from comparatively normal to crazy enough to freak everyone out and maybe get someone hurt in no time flat. That's a bit of a problem, especially given that some people work at places where accidents like slitting one's wrist wide open, crushing one's hand and being killed by an item dropped by a forklift happen a little too regularly, even to people who are not thus impaired.
When I worked in low paid (mainly call centre) jobs, people coming to work high was a pretty common thing. The jobs were easy and repetitive enough that it didn't affect performance at all. In fact if they had started drug testing they would probably have lost many of their best employees.