You could read an article right here right now that told you that 80% of all of the lizards in our state had died due to the fact that tobacco farmers changed to a new fertilizer. You might Facebook it and show it to a friend and send it to your anti-smoking buddies across the country or your Uncle Henry who loves lizards. You might even send it to your second cousin the tobacco farmer to ask him if he knows anything about it.
Don’t! Because just for the sake of making a point, all of that was just made up off of the top of my head within the past two minutes and there’s no truth involved. An odd thing happens when we see something in print – we want to believe it is true. Probably that is because news agencies used to have fact-checking bureaus that made sure everything was correct before they went ahead with it. Some still do. But the internet has made it possible for great amounts of info to come to great numbers of people and who knows what is really true anymore?
Unfortunately our Governor Nikki Haley was told that “half” the people wanting work at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site failed drug tests and half of the remainder couldn’t pass reading and writing tests. No one is sure who said it originally, but it seems to have turned out to be based on someone’s hearsay of hearsay, rolled up and exaggerated for emphasis. It sounds like an older man I know who always says, “half the time such and such….” and we all know that he really means “this keeps happening.”
Haley repeated what she heard and people took it as truth, coming from her. She stopped saying it now that it was questioned, and she apologized. The truth is, according to Department of Energy spokesman Jim Giust, less than 1 percent of the workers hired by the Savannah River Site's primary contactor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, failed pre-employment screening tests. He also pointed out that their policy for employment is similar to most companies across America: "We only screen people that have accepted a position at the Savannah River Site.” No other pre-employment screening is done before people accept the jobs.
Quest Diagnostics is a national drug testing company that produces an annual report of pre-employment and workplace drug testing.They stated that in 2010, less than 2 percent of pre-employment tests were positive for drugs nationally.
It’s important to keep people aware that the problems exist. But we’d better all stick to the facts.
