Drug tests at work? They're just a shabby trick by bosses who want to save on redundancy payments

It's perfectly reasonable to expect drug testing in certain lines of work. No one wants a nodding smackhead in charge of a crane

Here's a scenario. You've been working happily at your job in Dave's Envelopes Ltd for 10 years. You are a valued member of the team, and have never given the titular Dave any reason to doubt your loyalty or probity. Then comes the credit crunch. Fewer and fewer people are buying envelopes: everyone's sending those flimsy postcards you get in Ryman's instead. Dave's margins head south, and he announces a handful of voluntary redundancies.

You don't apply. You like your job. Then Dave announces that there's to be a compulsory medical for all remaining staff, including a drug test. Several of your workmates turn up the next day with a squeezy-bottle of baby's wee strapped to the insides of their thighs. Others show up, whistling insouciantly, in the orange robes of Krishna - heads and eyebrows newly shaved, and every inch of skin pink and shiny from waxing.

You do not. You submit to the drug test like a man - and it comes back positive. You had an E two weekends ago, and a spliff the night before last. Dave summons you into his office and tells you something to the effect that your illegal activities have brought his company into disrepute, and that you are being sacked immediately and without notice for gross misconduct.

He hands you a black bin liner, you fill it tearfully with your lucky gonks and your framed photographs of Lt Uhura from Star Trek, and out of the office you walk, with not one Hare Krishna meeting your eye.

According to the drugs charity Release, there has been a fourfold increase since last year in the number of calls they've received from people ambushed by their employers in just this way. Since 40% of the working population under 40 is reckoned to have taken drugs, this threatens a huge minority of the population.

It's perfectly reasonable to expect to be drug-tested in certain lines of work. Nobody particularly wants a nodding smackhead in charge of a crane, or an absent-minded dope-fiend refuelling their formula one car in the pits. But if you have worked for a long time in a white-collar environment, for a company that has taken no prior interest in your out-of-hours drug consumption, I think you're entitled to be outraged when they use it as an excuse to lay you off.

Employers are not doing this because your weekend reefer is interfering with your ability to manage the stationery cupboard or track invoices. They're not doing it because they think you're damaging the reputation of their company. They're doing it because they're grasping little eejits who want to save a few quid by not bothering to pay you the redundo that in both the law and natural justice are your right.

So the war on drugs is not just a waste of public money and a morally illiterate imposition on private behaviour. It is now offering a charter for companies to shirk their obligations to their employees. At a time when we're all preoccupied with activities - such as tax avoidance and expenses exploitation - that are within the law but still morally repulsive, how about we look at this one?

This turns, for expediency's sake, a small private wrong into a large public one. It permanently scars the CVs of a whole raft of workers, just as it releases them into a difficult job market. It not only makes their weeks or months of job-hunting harder, but it deprives them of any sort of financial buffer-zone. It makes it more likely that they will default on rent or mortgage payments, and makes their upkeep potentially the business of the state when it should rightly be, at least to start with, the responsibility of the company that has laid them off.

"Serves them right," some people will of course say. "Yes, nobody made them take drugs, did they? They have only themselves to blame. Drugs are illegal, in case you hadn't noticed. Eh? Serves them right. Eh?"

There are two responses to these people. One is a sharp punch to the smug pie-hole. The other is: "Serves you right, too. It's your taxes that'll be funding their dole."

Speaking of drugs, can it really have been 25 years ago this summer that one of the most elegant and absorbing and innovative videogames of all time appeared? I mean the space trading game Elite, launched a quarter of a century ago, in the days when the BBC Micro was a cutting-edge piece of technology and Thorpe Park was regarded as a groovy place to hold a press launch.

You could probably run Elite on a digital watch these days: but what David Braben and Ian Bell did with their tiny thimbleful of processing power was extraordinary. A whole galaxy rendered in 3D wireframe graphics. Thargons and Vipers and witch-space. Rotating space-stations. Trading, fighting, mining, fuel-scooping, space-flight. To a gaming public accustomed to the likes of Chuckie Egg, this was a silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien moment.

Remember the sound effects? "SkREeeeEEEE-OOOOO! Skreeeeee ... EEEEEE ... eeeeeOOOO!" For most of a generation, it's not the sound from the game, but the sound that it made loading from tape on to the BBC B microcomputer that truly brings back the blissful memories.

This week Sam watched Gillian Anderson in A Doll's House at the Donmar. "I didn't once think of Agent Scully." Sam also watched Miranda Richardson in Grasses of a Thousand Colours at the Royal Court. "I didn't once think of Queen Elizabeth I. I'm proud of my maturity."