D&A and Poppy seeds

To be accurate -

They ate an entire poppy seed cake, and I believe 8 bagels!

So Phill

Even if you told them that you had ate these rolls that contained the seeds and in the event that you had a positive result what would their actions be? I know they would stand us down but to what extent? IE job risk etc.

Tmba

Ooops! Had a cheese & tomato roll with suspicious looking black seeds today....

In fact any staff engaged in the operation of the Railway including contractors like cleaners.

Doesn't taking any medication that contains Coedine make you track restricted?

Also aren't ALL LU staff, even office workers & trainers etc, covered by the same rules over D&A?

If you work in an LU office then yes the same D&A policies apply.
If your are on medication which contains anything that may affect your performance then it would be light duties - no safety critical involvement with the Railway.

So eating a couple of Poppy seed cheese rolls and then rinsing your mouth with a bit of mouthwash before going to your random (!) D&A test isn't a very good idea then

thats actually the other way round...morphine family of drugs are derived from poppies...

There's no need to worry about this at all as long as you tell them what you've had/taken. The initial test is a general screen for opiates (similar to the road-side swabs the police can give you) and will test positive if you've had co-codamol for example. More in depth testing will look for the metabolic products (the by-products from your body breaking down these chemicals) of codeine phosphate and paracetamol in this example, and will give evidence of the dosage taken (eg amount of codeine in co-codamol is very small, hence its available to purchase without prescription). These metabolites are obviously going to be quite different to those produced from the break down of cocaine or heroin for example.

It just means a positive initial test follwed by a wait for the more detailed screening to be done - I know, it happened to me on my PTS medical!

The difference being that if you're office based and do not "control or affect the movement of trains" (as per the Transport and Works Act) you can't be prosecuted, only sacked.

Small quantities of codeine phosphate (I'm not sure what the upper limit is, but 5/500mg co-codamol is fine) are perfectly ok for PTS drug screening - is it really the case that LU & NR have different classifications for the same drug?

I would assume that the levels would be indicative of eating a few poppy seed rolls and not of something much more and as such the persons employing manager would be understanding.

If not ultimately the member of staff would either have alot of money to defend themselves or be a union member.