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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

When will we start seeing legislation forbidding employer discrimination against legal cannabis users in the form of drug tests?

No one cares if you've had a drink over the weekend, on your own time, as long as it's not affecting your on-the-job performance. Some companies have parties where alcohol is served, and going for drinks after work is quite common.

Yet so many companies require you to take drug tests before you get hired (and some have regular on-the-job drug tests), to prove you haven't used cannabis in the last 30 days -- even in states where it's legal, and even if you have a prescription for it.

This is obvious discrimination, and I hope one day the law recognizes it as such and forbids it.

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Pennsylvania seems to have started pushing towards that in the middle of last year:

"On Aug. 5, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania held for the first time that Pennsylvania's Medical Marijuana Act (MMA) allows an employee to sue his or her employer for taking an adverse employment action based on the employee's status as a certified user of medical marijuana."[1]

1: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...

The biggest barrier here is testing, IMO. There is no reliable way to tell if you are under the influence of marijuana _right now_. The only way an employer can guarantee you are sober while working (to shield themselves from liability) is to give a traditional drug test.

Are there reliable ways to tell if you are under the influence of other drugs other than alcohol? Can a similar test be provided for opiates, hallucinogens like DMT and other substances? Cocaine won't show up after a few days, but MJ will show up for weeks after usage.

Most hallucinogens are actually pretty reasonable when it comes to testing. Between the reasonably long effects, and the relatively short period where you won't piss clean, you can pretty much use a standard urine test as a test for being under the influence.

New York City and New York State have both made this illegal except for employees who have to register with the DOT.

https://www.leafly.com/news/lifestyle/marijuana-drug-tests-a...

Philadelphia has done this recently, to some extent: https://billypenn.com/2022/01/24/philadelphia-marijuana-empl...

Amazon is working on this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/26/why-amazo...

The key issue we have is that there are somewhat accurate-ish tests to check for acute and past alcohol usage, as well as defined impairment levels, but for THC we have neither breathalyzer-style tests nor impairment level standards. FWIW it's not even clear if blood should be tested for active THC, for byproducts or waste products.

That makes dealing with MJ impairment a bit of troublesome for companies... I agree that there should be no mandatory drug testing for a lot of employers that currently require one, but everything involving machinery should be allowed to have stricter standards.

To add a reply to a person who has since deleted:

> If you can do the job it shouldn't matter (and it's none of their business) if you're using a drug.

The thing is, there is no such thing as "can do the job" for operating machinery. We do have thresholds for allowed impairment from alcohol - e.g. in Germany it's if you cause an accident or show impairments of any kind with > 0.3‰ or get caught even without symptoms (aka random stop-and-blow) with >0.5‰ gets you an infraction ticket under §24a StVG, everything above 0.5‰ gets you a criminal DUI charge under §316 StGB.

These are pretty much generalized thresholds established over decades of research, and even then these lack fairness - as someone used to a liter of vodka a day will be walking straight if he only has 1l of beer, whereas your average random person won't be able to drive safely after the same amount of beer. And someone who has had only six hours of shit sleep, there is no detection at all assuming the data recorder of the truck shows that the driver has not operated it in the last 11 hours. But: it's the best we have.

For weed and other drugs, we don't have any kind of data to base a decision like "can you operate a vehicle/machinery" safely on, there is absolutely no way or standard to test for the physical ability to drive in any way and "self-assessment" of impairment state will always be notoriously unreliable. That is the problem.

I get it for machinery, but I got tested when I got a SWE job a few years ago at a BigCo. Like yes I get that you have a portion of your workforce on the ground and you need to drug test them, but come on I'm some dude sitting in his living room coding, I don't think safety is applied the same way in my "workplace"

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