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Read it and weep? There was no other conclusion the Court could have arrived at. It’s plain as day that the medical marijuana law does not provide employment protections, only defense against criminal prosecution.
I wonder if a firm could _require_ a positive drugs test as a precondition of employment. (Let the Stranger jokes commence….)
(I believe the ruling is 1.) right, in that it constitutes a correct reading of the law, and 2.) wrong because it encourages barbarism—but there’s no legal impediment to that.
(‘Barbarism’? Yes: it is barbarous to deny a person a job if she needs such to live decently and if there is no good reason to think she’d do badly, and also barbarous to ignore reason and evidence in favour of tribal tabou structures when deciding what constitutes a ‘good reason’.)
any and all marijuana and/or drug war issues can and will only be moved forward through referendums & initiatives. no matter how many people support a policy relating to marijuana and/or the drug war, the courts, the legislature, the governor & most local governments will do whatever they can do to maintain the status quo and/or make penalties worse. this is how progressive reform goes. the government has to be dragged kicking & screaming by the people.
@3, you are probably right. The kind of people, even some of the more radical ones, who run for office are usually too status quo to push for any needed changes.
Ooh, and only one dissenting judge, whose dissent is compassionate and well-reasoned, but not specific to the law as argued by the majority. If Washington’s legislature had some balls, they’d respond to this.
Chambers’ dissenting opinion is a good read. I wonder how it would have been determined had it gone to a jury, as he recommended.
This is an excellent case to use to advocate an employment protection law next based on bioethical and ADA principles. Don’t give up yet!
Old people are assholes.
Apologies if it’s in the PDF, but does this mean someone can terminated *with cause* for this? Or just terminated, but can collect unemployment just like anybody else? Because if it’s the latter, you can be terminated just for wearing the wrong color of shoes, since we’re an at-will state. If the former, than this is indeed unfair for unfortunately predictable reasons.
@3 and @4 are right.
The legislature and med mj advocates tried to address employment protections for patients during session and we were simply pounded to the ground by the association of washington business and other business groups over conflicts with federal employment law and they also waved about the prospect that we’d force businesses into allowing people to be high at work, when there was specific language stating it’d protect off-site use only. sadly, employment protection is something no other state has been to arrive at an answer for either. but the court’s lack of compassion for people who suffer from illnesses is not surprising at all.
@8, a woman whose headaches before her MMJ prescription were too severe to let her work was in 2006 offered a job contingent on passing background and reference checks and delivering a clean pee test. She offered the company her legit MMJ authorization but the company declined.
Two days later she took the drug test. Three days after that she began her company training, while that same day her supervisor got the drug test results and had the head office to confirm the company had no MMJ exception in its clean-drug-test policy for new hires.
Eight days later, the company fired her. Four months later, she filed suit, and now four years later here’s the Supreme Court decision.
The MMJ debate is dead; time to focus on OUTRIGHT LEGALIZATION/END OF PROHIBITION.
@3 & @4:
The initiatives will probably get us there more quickly.
If that doesn’t pan out in the next few years, I believe you’ll see political candidates running and winning on a platform that includes MMJ legalization/taxation in their platforms.
I’ll never forget the dumbfuck MC at the main stage at Hempfest in 2004 blabbering about how we need to elect John Kerry to stop Bush’s attacks on marijuana activists. We got a Democrat in the White House and the Democrats had control of Congress for two years. We had a Democratic governor and enough Democrats to send a medical marijuana bill to her.
How’d that turn out for ya, potheads?
If you think we’re gonna win on this by relying on the Democrats, you’re too stoned to be taken seriously.
Lobbying is for corporations, not for human beings. When human beings want rights, they do what all human beings have done to get rights: They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary.
@14: Do you ever do anything apart from bitch and moan?
The Democrats have had things on their plate ONE HELL OF A LOT more important than medical marijuana. Cadillac problems are what you’re whinging about.
Damn you @2! I’m just wonky enough to have read the whole damn-fool ruling and they you go and say EXACTLY what I was going to say!!!
Well… curses and congratulations to you!
The problem is that this is an at-will state. They don’t need a reason to fire you. They can fire you for getting high off the clock. They can fire you for drinking those 6 martinis if they want. This is why we need stronger worker protection laws and more unions. The employers have all the leverage.
@15 Oh c’mon, sure they have bigger problems (though needlessly having all those thousands of nonviolent marijuana users in prison funding the prison-industrual complex at the expense of our taxes & the 10s of thousands of people dying in Mexico which is at the very least partially because of our government’s prohbition on marijuana are decently sized problems, no?) but that doesn’t excuse the Dems from fighting reform tooth and nail like they are.
With Washington as an at-will employment state I can’t see why this is different from any other kind of dismissal. Any employer can release you from service at any time, for no reason. Why should having a pot scrip change that?
Good decision, bad law. The problem is that the justices were just interpreting whether the statute provided a cause of action against a dismissal. It pretty obviously doesn’t. If there is no cause of action, the plaintiff doesn’t even have a reason to be in court.
Next time pass better laws that forbid this. Good luck while federal policy is that it is illegal. The state stuff is basically just a defense in state court and in fed court on questions of state law. Pretty shitty. We could do better.
ST: Because washington is at will at common law. There are plenty of reasons you can’t fire an employee. Race, gender, retaliation etc. Wherever the state or local constitution or state or federal statutes say so, the relationship is not at will.
ST = @19
@19: Because you won’t get fired for testing positive for the presence of Xanax if you have a prescription. Marijuana is a medicine for lots of people and medical mj patients should have the same rights as any other patient, full stop.
This sucks… I was just telling my mom, who has multiple myeloma and a mm card, that she should sneak a hit here and there at work because her new treatment puts her on edge (like a massive emotional caffeine high, she describes it as). Thankfully she lives in a liberal town, works for a small gallery and is usually solo so she wont have a major risk… still, what if? Such a bummer.
@NaFun – because Washington is an at-will employment state a company CAN fire you for testing positive for Xanax. Alaska Airlines has a no-nicotine policy and regularly tests employees for nicotine. Smoking is fully legal, and the courts have upheld that as a private employer they have the rights to say who they want to employ. If a company can elect not to hire (or continue to employ) smokers, then why not allow them to not hire other drug users.
The beautify of at-will is it goes both ways. Folks should find companies which suit their needs, as well as the other way around. If you smoke pot (or cigs, or take xanax) then you should make sure you look for work at companies which don’t care about that.
Sparky @25 – hi! Smoking isn’t prescribed/recommended by a medical professional as part of treatment for a disease. Your employer can’t fire you for taking medicine.
@Nafun – interesting point. I’d have to research it further, but I recall cases where employers fired peeps for taking anti-depressants and it stood up in WA-state court.
If they are going to fire employees including those who are under medication, then I guess it s now the time to push the legalization of marijuana. As I read here: N.Y. and Connecticut lawmakers seek to decriminalize marijuana, newstype.com, a bill decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of weed narrowly passed the Connecticut Senate earlier this week. N.Y. has a comparable bill which tries to fix a loophole from an earlier decriminalization law. Even some proponents of the N.Y. bill see its passing as unlikely. The legislative session ends on June 20. There’s nothing wrong if it will approved. We just have to b responsible and disciplined.