Hydrocodone Dot Drug Test For Truckers
UpdatedMy husband is a CDL over-the-road driver. He comes home about once every three months for about 5 days. We don't use drugs. Our son was in an accident and he's 10 years old which resulted in a prescription for a bottle of hydrocodone. My boy only took a couple of those so they were on the Shelf unused. My husband came home and had been experiencing a lot of neck pain and I think it was from stress but we're not sure. He saw those pills and asked about them. I told him that he should take one of those before he goes to bed cuz it'll probably help him sleep better and less in his current pain situation. He took two of them. There were like 5 milligram hydrocodone. Well he does take random drug tests but never on his time off. Well they called for a random and want him to drive an hour away even though he just got home and just finished driving 1500 miles to put his truck in the shop. I had a job interview the next days and could not give him the car so he honestly could not go Drive the hour to go take the test with no vehicle.
His employer said in the next couple of days would be fine. Well we started stressing out majorly about the one dose of hydrocodone. He took a child size dosage one time but technically that could ruin his career and our lives. I don't think the drug test was setup for situations like this and I'm sure they won't distinguish from a drug addict failing to this situation which is not at all what it's intended to find. It's supposed to be looking for drug addict drivers that are unsafe on our roads. That's not my husband. In fact he has been driving 27 years and never had an accident. That is 27 years straight without even taking as much as a vacation. The only time he takes off is when the truck needs to be worked on. They're supposed to be catching people that are on drugs.
We took a drug test right before he went to take the dot test which was two and a half days later and it showed a faint line for opiates on the home test but when I read the instructions it said that a faint line is negative. We aren't even sure if the dot tests for this drug. Everything I have read about it indicated that people are trying to make the dot use an expanded panel which would test for prescriptions like this but that has not yet gone through to the best of my knowledge. Never the less you never know what is going to be on the drug test. I wish I could trust what I'm seeing on the internet that they don't test for it but I can't play that game with our career.
He went to take it today which is Thursday afternoon. He took the pills Monday evening and is not a regular user. just something about this doesn't sit well that a man that is a no way shape or form any type of addict he would lose his job for wanting to take a pill to relieve pain on his week off. If they're going to lay it on truck drivers this badly they really need to be testing all of the people that have any licenses to drive a car. They also should be subjected to random tests as long as they carry a driver's license. I have seen a lot of accidents involving big trucks where 95% of the time it was the car's fault. People need education about the blind spot of a big rig and why it's not a good plan to ride in it indefinitely and about how a big truck with a huge load on the back Can't Stop on a dime so cutting them off is not going to work out for you. If a driver of a big truck is subjected to this kind of testing then so should everyone that has a class C license. Imagine how many cars would be off the road if they were held to the same standard as class a licenses. If he does not pass this test because of that small child size dosage of hydrocodone I don't even know how we will survive. It's not possible. I'm going to follow up and let you guys know if the hydrocodone showed up all these days later in a non-user. I also read that it goes out of your system pretty quickly when you don't have a build up or you're not a user of it but the same paragraph said that it metabolizes differently in older people. That would be us. We are approaching 50 so probably have slow metabolism. Anyway he shouldn't have taken the hydrocodone I guess but I certainly hope it doesn't end up ruining our lives. The more I think about that the more unfair I think it is because every person that's over 30 years old is going to need to take a pain pill at some point in their life even if it's not ordered by a doctor in the right kind of pain you would take what's available especially if it's coming from your wife or your children through their prescription. Right? No normal person would hesitate. Especially if you're at the starting day of your time off. He is not some big addict that they're about to catch and score but what A+ resulting test would do is take a perfectly safe lifetime truck driver off of the road for doing something as any other normal family would do in the same situation. That was my first thought when he came home is to let him take one of those leftover pills for relief. I didn't look at it any differently then when I give him my antibiotics to carry in his truck in case he gets sick on the road. It did not register at the time as something risky or Reckless. Even if I had thought of a DOT drug screen I wouldn't have thought about hydrocodone being on it as it is used widely. It must be safe or they wouldn't have handed it to my 10 year-old son. I remember back in the nineties getting prescribed hydrocodone for a bad ear infection... now that same pill could cost someone their job??? I need to become a lobbyist.
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