Drug warriors have a nasty habit of bait-and-switch when it comes to marijuana. It goes a little something like this: when confronted with a serious question, they change the subject and try to reframe the debate. For instance, when asked about medical marijuana, Drug Czar John Walters is fond of saying that allowing sick and dying people to use cannabis would send the wrong message to children.

Today's example comes from Alaska, where you've probably heard me say that voters are set to decide whether to essentially legalize marijuana for personal use. Greg O'Claray is the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development. He writes a column in the Frontiersman that does nothing to address the safety or effects of marijuana. Instead, he threatens that Alaskans could lose their jobs or not be hired in the first place because of workplace drug testing.

At first I thought the commissioner's attitude toward marijuana was because he'd had a bad experience with it when he was younger. But as it turns out, he's anti-marijuana because it can cause you to fail a drug test.

If you think you can just not smoke pot for a few days before going in for the pre-employment drug screening, think again. That might work once. But it's why employers also implement random drug screening. Maybe tomorrow, in a week or a month, sooner or later you'll be unemployed again and out the door. In a lot of personnel offices, that door will slam hard and permanently behind you.

Any advice on Measure 2, Commissioner?

My message about your freedom is simple. Your lifestyle is your business as long as your choices don't endanger the person standing next to you on the job. But if your lifestyle interferes with workplace health and safety, that's your employer's business.

By not acknowledging reality, which dictates that a person's Saturday marijuana use does nothing to endanger his co-worker on Monday, O'Claray has managed to turn the debate about policy and freedom into an invocation of fear. He resorts to the tired "Would you want your heart surgeon stoned?" defense.

For the record, I would NOT want my heart surgeon stoned. But I'd have less of a problem if my heart surgeon smoked marijuana two days before my operation than I would if she random-drug-tested his employees and made them fearful for their jobs because of what they do on the weekends.