Stoned on the Job

“I know the bill passed to legalize recreational use of marijuana in California. Does this mean I’m going to have employees stoned while working?”

Your HR Survival Tip

Even with recreational use of marijuana legalized in California, this doesn’t mean you’ll have to manage stoned employees.

As long as marijuana is still on the Federal illegal drugs list, your company can be drug-free. Of course, you’ll want a policy stating that so everyone understands. This is the same as allowing or disallowing medical marijuana in the workplace. ANY use of marijuana by employees is a company decision because Federal law says you can prohibit it.

The tricky part is that recreational use of marijuana over the weekend means they’d probably fail a drug test on Monday. Unlike alcohol, drugs stay in your system longer than the time period the person is feeling the affects of the drug. Therefore, you’ll probably hear arguments that they are no longer stoned on Monday even though a drug test would say differently.

If you really want a drug-free work environment, your employees have to understand that (for now) this means they shouldn’t even be using on a recreational basis.

It helps to present the arguments from the company’s view of this:

• Policy — There’s a reason you decided to have a drug and alcohol-free work environment. Those reasons haven’t changed just because a law did.
• Company Liability — Bottom line is that any work-related accident or incident creates a big liability for your company. The liability increases dramatically when testing after an accident is conducted and the employee is found to have been working while under the influence.
• Employee Liability — Even though the company takes the first legal hit, employees can be individually sued by outside parties. If the employee was driving and in an accident, do you really think an attorney will ignore the fact that the employee tested positive for drug residue in their system?
• Safety — Both the employee and others are at risk if reflexes are slowed while driving or operating equipment. This is why employees on prescription drugs should notify their managers… they need to be pulled off that work while on that prescription if it makes them drowsy or clumsy.
• Productivity — You need your employees to be using their full abilities or your productivity levels and revenues could drop.

By the time the Federal government legalizes marijuana, we can hope they will have a way of testing that shows the level of drug in the system (like alcohol levels). That will make it much easier to determine who is and is not still being affected by the drug when working. However, until then, understand your risks and be very clear about your drug policy.