Another major incentive for employers to update their drug policies to include prescription medications is because many insurance companies that employers have policies through off the companies a large premium credit on the worker’s compensation insurance if their policies do include those stipulations and if they do perform drug tests regularly. The belief being that if the testing happens more often, and those prescription medications are tested for and monitored closely by employers then accidents are far less likely to happen in the workplace thus the insurance company will have to pay out even less.

While it is not a federal law that regulates the “Drug Free” workplace, but laws at the state level that do, the policies that originally went into place around 1988 have changed very little in the more than 20 years since their implementations. This is unfortunately where all the confusion comes from. The same way we are currently dealing with confusion over not so carefully worded laws / rights in the constitution right now, we have to deal with it even at this level for far more recent laws. Unfortunately only hindsight is 20/20 and when writing the laws and putting them into action the people in charge of our laws and security and government do not always word things specifically enough. And so, until they are reviewed and hopefully re-written the freedom to write drug testing policies that include prescription medications is at the hands of the company. Feel free to make sure your state official knows where you stand on the issue, because until the public speaks up nothing will change.