Tom Duke LLp at Miltom Management - January 23rd presentation, Marijuana in the Workplace, provided a brief history and suggested strategies to manage medicinal and recreational marijuana use.
Medical Marijuana, first legalized in 2001 will become legal for recreational use in the summer of 2018. Marijuana’s dozens of strains and many potency levels raise challenges for accurate impairment tests. The result? We can expect far greater potency which can be detected in bloodstreams for days or weeks after ingestion.
Current tests indicate ingestion within 4-6 hours, yet do not account for strain & potency, environmental surroundings, frequency of use, or method of consumption. New tests also face challenges based on privacy and on questions about impairment levels, so that employers can ensure workers are not impaired at work. Questions arouse related to employees’ safe setting along with medical marijuana protection. Since employees are not permitted to be impaired at work, will anti-smoking laws apply to marijuana as they apply currently to regular cigarettes?
Tom detailed specific cases to show how legal use of marijuana may be treated in a similar manner to rules for alcohol consumption. He suggested that use of medical marijuana to treat medical conditions must be treated in a similar manner to other prescription drugs that can cause impairment. Tom engaged questions from Rotarians related to how employer and employee report use or abuse of medically prescribed marijuana, lawyer interventions, and concerns about recreational marijuana at work. He discussed how one avoids decisions based on stigma around marijuana or on assumptions about the use of marijuana and its impact on employees’ ability to do their jobs. Through shared cases and Tom’s gracious interactions with thoughtful Rotarian comments brought to the discussion, we left with more understanding of the issue as well as further articulated questions to investigate in future.
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