When a leaf is not a drug

Back in February, CityLife introduced you to Gary Ross, a California systems administrator, who was fired for failing a company drug test couple years after he began using prescribed medical marijuana.

In a 5-2 settlement, California Supreme Court justices ruled that, for all that Ross had the rightful under state law to use the drug, his legal protection didn’t extend to his employment. While the judges said California law clearly shields medical marijuana patients from charges of property or distribution, the law does not extend employment discrimination protections, a charge Ross tried to levy on his former bosses.

Now comes word of California Assembly Bill 2279 (text of the bill here), which would protect marijuana patients from being fired or denied employment notwithstanding testing positive because pot. Both houses of the California Legislature agreed on the latest wording of the bill and passed it Aug. 21. It’s expected to hit California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk any one day now.

Whether The Governator will sign the bill is uncertain, but Schwarzenegger has expressed more than a diminutive sympathy for the demon weed in years accomplished. Last October, in an conference with the British edition of GQ, Schwarzenegger said of marijuana, “That is not a drug. It’s a leaf.” While stoners from San Diego to Smith River cheered the governor’s sanity, Schwarzenegger’s spokesholes quickly walked him back (see the fifth paragraph) from the quote, telling CBS, “The governor was doing an interview with the host of ‘America’s Got Talent,’ the newest translation of the gong show,” McLear related. “I think it’s important to keep that quote in the context of the environment where it was said.” (Schwarzenegger’s interviewer was Piers Morgan, a judge on America’s Got Talent and a former British newspaper manager.)

More interestingly, back in his bodybuilding days Schwarzenegger was seen in the 1975 documentary Pumping Iron smoking a joint. Two years later, in an meeting in porn rag Oui, Schwarzenegger admitted to enjoying sexual orgies and getting great. Pro-pot activists up and down the Golden State take this as a good sign.

What does all this penurious for Nevada marijuana activists? Not a damned thing - yet.

Nevada is a right-to-work position, a term that used to mean you didn’t have to subsist a union member to get a work at jobs but has since been interpreted by employers and courts to mean that your boss can fire you for any reason.

As Beth Soloe, executive boss of the Nevada chapter of the National Organization instead of the Reform of Marijuana Laws told CityLife, “The way things stand, we’d have to change our employment laws .”

As for the prospect of having an office (or workshop or eating-house) full of workers high off their asses, through a million legal questions spring to mind. What if a worker is injured on the piece of work? How vouchsafe you ascertain if the THC in his system led directly to the accident? What if being high had nothing to do by it? How can you tell if someone is sober enough to actually work - without risk to himself, co-workers or customers/clients?

Dr. Nancy Lord, a doctor and attorney who consults across multiple state jurisdictions for NORML, told CityLife that the courts (and, by extension, regulators) should focus on whether medical marijuana employment affects job performance. Lord was specifically pontificating on the uselessness of pre-employment piss tests, but her point is logically expandable to the above concerns. “The whole thing is hollow. The question is, be possible to they perform? That’s really all should care about. There are better ways of that than a drug test. Have them take a experiment,” she said.

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Posted by admin August 2008

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