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Since Cannabis is Increasingly Legal, Employers Need to Stop Screening For It

Legal barriers to marijuana are falling all over the United States. Pot, tried by nearly half of all Americans at some point in their lives, is already legal in some form in 23 states, and four states allow recreational use. Last Friday, two House bills were filed that could end the federal prohibition of marijuana, including one which would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act’s schedules and regulate it similarly to alcohol. And, pot is legal in the District of Columbia.

Now there’s one thing that needs to disappear along with the prohibition of marijuana: employee drug testing.

Privacy arguments aside — should employers really be in the business of demanding body fluids from their workers? — this testing is expensive and does not effectively screen for good employees. In fact, it probably doesn’t effectively screen for drug users. Yet companies continue to drug test potential employees, even in states where medical marijuana is legal.

Even back in 1999, when pot legalization was nothing more than a pipe dream, an ACLU study concluded that drug tests were overly expensive and a poor indicator of workplace performance because they don’t test for impairments. Drug tests search for drug metabolites, which are by-products excreted from the body after a drug has been ingested. This means tests might catch a person who used an illicit substance in the recent past but probably not a person who is under the influence during the taking of the test; it takes a few hours for drug metabolites to appear in urine. Tests are arguably more likely to catch occasional users than drug abusers. [Read more at The Washington Post]

 

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