When I first applied to work for the underground they sent me to Lisson Grove job centre to take reading, writing and map-reading tests. As this dragged on all morning, I became extremely bored, which, I later came to realise, was the most relevant test for the job. Those of us certified fit were signed up for our interviews and medicals and, to our horror, drug tests.
This hadn't been mentioned on the poster, which had said £16,000pa and not much else, and some of my potential colleagues had trouble believing it.
"Surely it's not for grass?" asked a chap wearing sandals, but it was. The piece of paper they gave me said they were testing for ecstasy, heroin, speed, cocaine, barbiturates and cannabis. Now while people running a train service can hardly be flying out of their heads, this is a bit tough on the cannabis smokers. Aside from being the least harmful and most popular drug, dope is also the only one which can be traced for up to a month after use. The more malignant chemicals are gone within two or three days. I had a personal stake in this injustice since I had been smoking cannabis a few nights before and now had a test date early the next week. It was looking like a mightily expensive eighth of hash.
A week may be a long time in politics but it's a very short time in metabolising cannabis. I was stuck with a hefty dose of marijuana inside me and no way of postponing the test. Nobody could come up with any decent ideas. The one which was suggested most frequently was that I borrow someone else's urine and pass it off as my own. One friend of mine knew two bus drivers who had done this. There were some conditions, he told me. It had to come from a man. He had a good laugh at the idea of me being told "Congratulations—you passed the drugs test, and you're expecting a baby!" Not only that, but it had to be kept at body temperature until you gave it to the doctor. And even if I could have managed that, I, a young man living in London, was flummoxed by the most important proviso—finding a person clean of drugs to supply a sample.
That I passed the test was by virtue of two things. First, I drank an incredible amount of water before it and was pissing pure Malvern spring by the time I got there. Second, cannabis smokers get an extra chance because of the passive smoking defence. Since you can accidentally inhale wafts of ganja smoke just by walking around London, there is a permissible amount of marijuana in your urine for which you don't fail. According to the guidelines, it is equivalent to spending four hours in a phone box with three people continuously smoking joints. This raises a few questions. How strong were the joints? How potent was the hashish? How long after leaving the phone box could you pass the test (or walk)? And where exactly is this phone box?
During training there were oblique references to "a weekend in Amsterdam" and why that wasn't a good idea. One woman warned us of the dangers of passive smoking. "I don't know if you know," she told us, "but if it's in the air it can make you feel a bit funny." "Oh, can it?" asked a voice from the back.
A new eyeball scanner on the market could provide a better solution. It tests—by checking the reaction speed of the pupil—the employee's impairment at that moment, rather than what they were doing three nights ago. Unfortunately it also flags up simple tiredness, the norm in a job with so much shift-work and unsocial hours.
Of course, smoking weed is a minority habit, even among the younger staff. The underground still has, like the rest of the country, a drinking culture. Not quite like in the old days, when there were staff bars above the drivers' depots, but it endures in any case.
The staff bars have long gone. And people have to be careful, whatever their pleasure, because random drug and alcohol tests stalk you like a hungry tiger. Every so often you get an unsolicited call telling you to go to the manager's office for an unspecified reason. You then have to rack your brains to remember how much you had to drink last night or when you last had a smoke. If you are definitely clean, you trot up there. If you are definitely unclean, you throw yourself down the escalators, or something equally spectacular, and book off sick. Only if you're unsure are you in trouble, and the prospect of the dole queue puts a Saturday night puff squarely in the shade.
