(Detroit Free Press) Employers are facing tough issues as they try to navigate the state’s fledgling medical marijuana law, such as the difference between “smoke” and “ingest.”
Or whether company policies on drug testing still apply in a state where 63% of voters approved a new law last fall allowing medical use of marijuana.
One section of the law says a registered user can’t be “subject to arrest, prosecution or penalty in any manner or denied any right or privilege including … disciplinary action by a business … for the medical use of marijuana.”
Another portion of the law says “nothing in this act shall be construed to require an employer to accommodate the ingestion of marijuana in any workplace or any employee working while under the influence of marijuana.”
A third section says no one can possess or use medical marijuana on a school bus or on school grounds, but smoking pot is expressly prohibited only on public transportation or in any public place. It’s unclear… whether it’s OK for a certified user to eat, for example, marijuana-laced brownies in a public place.
Why the hell not? Geez, what do you think happens, the super-potent Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed™ causes the brownie eater to strip off their clothes and run naked through the park? I can understand an objection to smoking marijuana in a public place where others may not appreciate the smell, but this idea that we need to confine people who use a certain medicine to the shadows is unAmerican and repulsive!
My father is disabled and among the handful of pills he must take every day are some Vicodin, a very addictive, very powerful, potentially fatal drug. Yet nobody is telling my dad he can’t pop open his pill bottle at the public park when it’s time for his medicine. Why would they?
If an employer were to require his employees to be free from the influence of Vicodin while on shift, we could certainly understand that. But would he require that they not take Vicodin once they get off work?
How people who’ve never used marijuana perceive marijuana fascinates me. People who can openly tolerate parking lots at taverns and .08 BAC laws freak out over the idea that a pot smoker might drive a car. People who can accept a Marinol bottle with the warning “until you know how you’ll react to Marinol, don’t drive or operate heavy machinery” implode at the thought of a medical marijuana patient driving a forklift or a school bus. People who make jokes at work about their hangovers or go to work sick loaded on anti-histamines and psuedoephedrine will regale you with the notion that a person who fails a marijuana metabolite pee test is an unsafe worker and a drain on company productivity.
The law seems pretty clear to me: no disciplinary action for using medical marijuana. Accommodating it at work would mean building a smoking tent outside for your cardholders and allowing them to take breaks to medicate on the job; nobody is suggesting that. What we’re suggesting – and the law supports – is that a person cannot be fired, not hired, or punished solely for being a medical marijuana patient. If you drug test them and they test positive for marijuana metabolites, that test simply reveals they are a medical marijuana patient, a status you cannot punish them for. How much clearer could it be? If you catch them with weed on the job site (smokeable or in a brownie), you have a cause for action, but if you just catch them with inactive metabolites in their pee, let them work.
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