My sympathies to all of the soon-to-be unemployed cannabis users in
Colorado. Thanks to the wisdom of the Colorado Supreme Court, you can be fired from your job if you test positive for cannabis – even if you only get high on your day off and are a quadriplegic medical cannabis patient. Colorado legalized medical cannabis 15 years ago and recreational cannabis has been legal in Colorado since 2012. But that doesn’t matter. Test positive for cannabis, and your employers are well within their rights to fire you.
The court ruled specifically that because cannabis is illegal under federal law, cannabis patients have no right to consume cannabis while they are off the clock. Pshaw. Whatever happened to personal freedom and small government?
I’m still trying to figure out how the Colorado Supreme Court could let this happen. Maybe they don’t know that it’s possible to test positive for cannabis even when you aren’t stoned? Maybe they don’t know that Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island and Arizona, all have job protection laws for medical cannabis users.
Also, do people that have prescriptions for other medicines, like Percocet or Klonopin, or Vicodin or Oxycontin get fired for having traces of those drugs in their system without a valid prescription? No, of course not: most places don’t even test for it, as it would violate your medical privacy.
The Colorado Supreme Court might have been better served if they had followed the logic of the California Supreme Court argument in a similar case seven years ago: the California court ruled that the law allows you to stay out of jail if you use
cannabis as a medicine but it doesn’t protect you from getting fired if it’s found
in your system because cannabis is still technically illegal in California – we just
allow some medical exceptions to its illegality. Cannabis is, however, completely
legal in Colorado, so there is no reason to fire anyone because the federal
government hasn’t caught up with the states, as long as they aren’t showing up to
work visibly or obviously under the influence of weed.
Not that I care if some people are a little stoned at work – I am pretty sure more than a few people in America are drunk at work, and they still have their jobs (including people who want cannabis prohibition to remain in effect for perpetuity).
And, while I wouldn’t want my brain surgeon or my tax accountant to show up for work all dabbed out from a fat session in the parking lot, I don’t care if the person who puts the stickers on the fruit at the supermarket has a pleasant buzz, or if my barista takes the time to draw a kitty-cat face in my foam because she is high and awesome. Maybe that customer service rep might be a little more empathetic toward the customers if there’s a little cannabis in her latte. Some menial tasks are made more pleasant with the addition of a little cannabis – just try it next time you wash the dishes.
It’s just a matter of time before we get better job protection rules for medical
cannabis patients. Right now, 38 states have some sort of medical cannabis law on
the books, and at least three more states should have legal recreational cannabis by the end of 2016.
Either we will all have to stop working for corporations and form small, collectively run local businesses, or the courts will have to lighten up about people that light up.
