EOC week 5: Marijuana in the workplace

Today I’m going to discuss about a case that happened in Colorado about a young man who was tragically injured in a car accident and the only thing that could help relieve his pain and muscle spasms was medical marijuana treatments.  When Brandon Coats was 16 he was involved in a car accident that left his upper spine crushed. He became paralyzed and has sporadic muscles spasm that left him in pain and disruptive sleep.  With no help in the prescription drug industry Brandon turned to his last hope, medical marijuana. He would only smoke at night to help sleep and never used when he was on the job site. When one day his job, Dish Network, decided to do a random drug test, Brandon failed and was terminated. This being said do you think, if you are using medical marijuana, in the comfort of your home and have the right documentations to use the drug, should your employer still be able to terminate you over the drug test?  It's been 25 years since the federal Drug-Free Workplace Act was passed, creating requirements for federal government workers and contractors. Many companies, including Dish Network, followed suit, and today more than a third of private employers have drug-testing policies. My take on the whole situation, and you don’t have to agree with me, is that if you have a visibly clear reason to why you use recreational drugs and have the proper requirements to use those drugs then you should most definitely be exonerated. Now if the employee was using at the workplace or doesn’t have the right requirements then of course they should be terminated for wrongful use in the workplace. But in Brandon’s case it should be qualified as a disability protection. The standard urine test most commonly used in employer drug testing measures the presence of THC — a psychoactive compound in marijuana that persists in the body for days, weeks or even longer. So a positive marijuana test doesn't necessarily mean the person taking the test is high, or has even used the drug recently. This being said if Brandon was using for medical reasons and there was low to none THC, which there are, then should he be exonerated? Barry Sample is director of science and technology for Quest Diagnostics, which conducts millions of drug tests. He says there may eventually be intoxication tests for pot that are more like the Breathalyzer's detection of recent alcohol use. "It might be possible at some point, but it's still developing," So hopefully in the near future people like Brandon can be exonerated from cases like this.