Pubdate: Sat, 10 Apr 2010
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Page: 11A
Copyright: 2010 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Author: Bruce Maiman
Note: Bruce Maiman is a former radio show host living in Rocklin.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)

WHY FIRE PEOPLE FOR MEDICAL POT USE?

Even if you use it responsibly, marijuana is the only drug you can 
get fired for using legally in California.

Each day, many of Californians show up for work medicated, even hung 
over, and the only person the employer can legally fire is the pot smoker.

Christian Hughes managed a senior citizens apartment complex near 
Redding for five years. A new company bought the complex and 
implemented drug testing. Hughes failed and was fired despite:

Informing his new employer that he used medical marijuana outside the 
workplace under his doctor's advice.

A five-year work history with no evidence of impairment on the job. 
Residents never even knew he smoked medicinally.

The irony that pot probably made it easier for him to do his job, as 
it helped relieve pain from a shattered jaw sustained in a car accident.

Pot helped him get back to work. We want folks to work, don't we? 
Christian's new employers saw it differently. But after a month on 
unemployment, Christian found similar work with another company at a 
facility in Red Bluff.

Christian's biggest mistake: He wasn't using something worse, like 
Vicodin, OxyContin or Percocet. Such prescription drugs are far more 
dangerous. Over-the-counter allergy medicines warn us not to operate 
heavy equipment. Alcohol can have immediate debilitating effects.

In most cases those trace elements in a drug test will get you fired.

The problem: We're conflating usage with impairment.

No impaired employee should be on the job, and employers should be 
able to fire an impaired employee if his condition impacts job 
performance, jeopardizes the safety of individuals, co-workers or 
customers, or puts companies at risk of liability.

But that's not what this is about. Whether it's the 2008 state 
Supreme Court ruling allowing employers to fire medicinal users or 
federal laws making marijuana illegal no matter the use, what this 
really boils down to is zero tolerance based on old-school paradigms, 
arcane drug laws, hypocritical prejudices and outright ignorance.

It's a bias based on underlying beliefs within lingering remnants of 
society that pot smokers are dopers, hippies and Dorito-munching 
deadbeats leeching off the system while listening to Grateful Dead 
albums on vinyl.

For instance, the California Chamber of Commerce argues that an 
employer's right to maintain a drug-free workplace is critical in 
order to protect the safety of all workers and limit exposure to 
potentially costly litigation.

Please! What the chamber really thinks is that pot smokers and only 
pot smokers are dangerous. Otherwise they'd insist that all 
drug-tested employees who show traces of prescription drugs, allergy 
medicines and alcohol be subject to firing.

Indeed, they should be subject to termination, if they smoke on the 
job, drink on the job, are impaired on the job. Someone who smokes 
medicinally after dinner is no more impaired the next morning than 
the employee in the afternoon who had a cocktail at lunch. But our 
preconceived notions tell us the pot smoker is a subhuman lawbreaker 
and the cocktail drinker is a white collar professional.

Christian Hughes wasn't fired for performing tasks made more 
dangerous by smoking pot. He was fired simply for smoking pot despite 
its medical approval by a licensed physician, its legal protection 
under Proposition 215 and his responsible usage as an exceptional employee.

It's not the substance that makes an employee a liability; it's the 
behavior that makes the employee a liability. You fire the behavior, 
not the drug.

A 2008 bill introduced by then-Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San 
Francisco, would have allowed employers to fire workers who were 
impaired on the job, but protected employees from being targeted 
because of their medical status as marijuana-medicating patients.

"Otherwise," says now-state Sen. Leno, "you might as well have passed 
a law that stipulates you can't smoke medical marijuana unless you're 
unemployed. That's the logic."

The bill passed both houses of the Legislature, but Gov. Arnold 
Schwarzenegger vetoed it. Leno says he'll try again with a newly 
elected governor.

Back when I went to work for ABC News, I took a drug test. In 
private, I took the cup handed to me by the attendant and poured in a 
bottle of warm apple juice. I immediately felt better knowing this 
would befuddle some poor lab technician.

It didn't get that far.

With a quizzical look on her face, the attendant held the cup to the 
light and said, "My, this sure looks peculiar." I grabbed the cup and 
said, "Well, maybe we better run it through again." I drank it, and 
the woman shrieked in horror and fainted to the floor.

I still got hired.

I don't do drugs, don't smoke or drink. But targeting pot smokers 
just because they're pot smokers is beyond unfair.

If we think it ludicrous to suspend a third-grader for bringing nail 
clippers to school, then it's equally absurd to fire someone for 
traces of pot smoked at home despite a job history showing no 
evidence of impairment at work.

Let's address the abuse and not the use of a drug -- any drug. We're 
smart enough to know the difference.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom