40 PERCENT OF OIL RIG WORKER AND TRUCK DRIVER JOB APPLICANTS CANNOT PAS DRUG SCREENING TESTS

The country is going to pot; schools have failed miserably in dealing with the use of drugs

The Eagle Ford Shale is a hydrocarbon producing formation rich in oil and natural gas fields. The shale play trends across roughly 20 Texas counties from the Mexican border up toward Dallas County, roughly 50 miles wide and 400 miles long with an average thickness of 475 feet.

The energy industry wants to hire thousands of workers for Eagle Ford. According to a study by the University of Texas at San Antonio, Eagle Ford Shale supported 47,097 full-time jobs in 2011, a number that's expected to grow to 116,972 full-time jobs by 2021. Applicants are coming from all over the United States seeking jobs at Eagle Ford, but 30-40 percent of them are not hired because they cannot pass drug screening tests.

Here is an excerpt from ‘Drug Tests A Barrier In Eagle Ford Hiring,’ a report by Vicki Vaughn that was published in the August 25 issue of the Houston Chronicle:

__Employers say they're rejecting 30 percent to 40 percent of all shale job applicants because they can't pass a pre-employment drug test, said Leodoro Martinez, who moderated a panel discussion about workforce issues at the Texas Economic Development & Energy Summit. The audience included energy industry officials, elected officials, public officials and economic development officials.

__Drug use is "a family, school and community problem" that needs to be addressed but won't be easily solved, said Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio.

__Doug Ridge, director of employer initiatives for the Texas Workforce Commission, agreed, saying drug use "is a big, big problem, a major problem."

Ridge also said that engineers and other professionals are far less likely to fail the drug tests than applicants for jobs on rigs or as truckers. But when up to 40 percent of job applicants in their 20s-40s cannot pass a drug screening test, this country has a problem of enormous proportions. These people didn’t start using drugs just recently. They began to use drugs during their middle school and high schools years, and in almost every instance they started out by smoking marijuana.

The Eagle Ford Shale employment problem points out that our schools and communities have failed miserably in dealing with a serious drug problem. In California, the idiot voters exacerbated the drug problem by passing a medical marijuana law that has, in effect, legalized the use of pot. And with the former Golden State's 10.7 percent unemployment rate, you can bet that a good number of those who failed their drug tests came to Eagle Ford from California.

If left unabated, the use of illegal drugs will be devastating to the future of our country. And if anyone thinks that legalizing marijuana will reduce the problem, they’ve got to be stoned out of their half-witted minds.