One of the ways state medical marijuana programs have failed to fully extend protection to medicinal users is in their failure to defend against employment discrimination. This is now beginning to change, thanks to a few recent court decisions in favor of patients and employees.<\/p>\n
The case of Connecticut health care worker Katelin Noffsinger was profiled by the\u00a0Associated Press<\/a>\u00a0on Oct. 2. At her job interview with the Bride Brook Health & Rehabilitation Center in Niantic, where she had applied for the position of recreation therapy director, Noffsinger openly stated that she used a medical marijuana product to control the PTSD she has suffered from since a car crash \u2014 and emphasized that she only took it before bed at night, so she would not be under its influence on the job. Nonetheless, when a drug test<\/a> came back positive for THC, the nursing home withdrew the job offer.<\/p>\n Noffsinger went to court in 2016, and last month District Judge Jeffrey Meyer in New Haven ruled that the nursing home had violated an anti-discrimination provision of Connecticut\u2019s medical marijuana law.<\/p>\n The case isn\u2019t over, as the judge denied Noffsinger\u2019s request for punitive damages. The next move is a trial to determine whether she should receive compensatory damages for lost wages from not getting the job.<\/p>\n Further details are provided by the\u00a0Jackson Lewis<\/a>\u00a0law blog. Noffsinger was registered as a \u201cqualifying patient\u201d under Connecticut Palliative Use of Marijuana Act (PUMA<\/a>). She was, however, actually using\u00a0Marinol<\/a> \u2014 synthetic THC in capsule form. And Marinol is an FDA-approved prescription drug and is in Schedule III, the\u00a0DEA classification<\/a>\u00a0for drugs with legitimate medical applications and a low potential for abuse. This despite the fact that the DEA\u00a0officially clarified<\/a>\u00a0in December 2016\u00a0that all cannabis extracts remain in the highly restrictive Schedule I \u2014 the same classification as the cannabis plant itself. The ostensible justification for this contradiction is that Marinol contains a synthetic form of THC, not an actual plant-derived extract.<\/p>\n In any case, Marinol\u2019s legal status makes the denial of the position to Noffsinger all the more outrageous.<\/p>\n As the Associated Press account notes, the Connecticut decision was the first ruling of its kind in a federal case. But it followed similar recent rulings against employers by state courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This begins to reverse an earlier trend, which saw the high courts in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington rule in favor of employers in discrimination suits over medical marijuana use.<\/p>\n \u201cThis decision reflects the rapidly changing cultural and legal status of cannabis, and affirms that employers should not be able to discriminate against those who use marijuana responsibly while off the job, in compliance with the laws of their state,\u201d Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML<\/a>), said to AP.<\/p>\n By the count of the\u00a0National Conference of State Legislatures<\/a>, 31 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam, now have medical marijuana programs, while 15 others have more limited programs allowing use of low-THC (but high-CBD) preparations for medical use. Only nine states, including Connecticut, have explicitly barred employment discrimination against medical marijuana users.<\/p>\n In June 2017, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court\u00a0ruled<\/a>\u00a0that a sales and marketing company wrongly fired employee Christine Barbuto after she tested positive for marijuana, which she used under the state\u2019s medical program to treat her Crohn\u2019s disease. And in May 2017, the Rhode Island Supreme Court\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0that a college student was wrongly denied an internship at a fabric company after she acknowledged she could not pass a drug test because of her medical marijuana use. The denial was deemed to violate the state\u2019s disability discrimination act, as well as provisions of its medical marijuana law.<\/p>\n The\u00a0American Bar Association<\/a>\u00a0called the Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island cases \u201can emerging trend in employment litigation\u201d and advised employers to take state medical marijuana laws into consideration when crafting their drug use and testing policies.<\/p>\n All this must surely be viewed as vindication by Brandon Coats,\u00a0a Colorado quadriplegic who was fired by a satellite TV company in 2010 after he failed a drug test. In June 2015, the Colorado Supreme Court\u00a0unanimously upheld<\/a>\u00a0a lower court decision that the company\u2019s \u201czero tolerance\u201d drug policies were not pre-empted by Colorado\u2019s medical marijuana law.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> do you think that employees have a right to use medical marijuana?<\/p>\n The post Courts Rule Workers Cannot Be Denied Employment for Medical Cannabis Use<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
One of the ways state medical marijuana programs have failed to fully extend protection to medicinal users is in their failure to defend against employment discrimination. This is now beginning to change, thanks to a few recent court decisions in favor of patients and employees. The case of Connecticut healthContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6112,50,737,484,4503,90,3894,25,357],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29815,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29814\/revisions\/29815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Similar Victories in Massachusetts, Rhode Island<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Courts Rule Workers Cannot Be Denied Employment for Medical Cannabis Use<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"