Following recent contract negotiations, the Seattle Times removed marijuana from the list of drugs prohibited under its substance-abuse policy. Congrats to the newspaper bosses and Communications Workers of America Local 37082 for bringing Washington’s biggest paper up to speed with state law.
Bringing down the green barrier was long overdue. Consider: When the Seattle Times‘ editorial board drooled over the “pot of money” that legal weed would bring to Washington, the paper still screened its employees to make sure they weren’t smoking it. The next year, when the Seattle Times assigned Jonathan Martin as the paper’s first marijuana reporter, he was ostensibly liable for marijuana testing. (A Seattle Times spokesperson said, “As a privately held company, we don’t have a practice of making our internal policies and procedures public.”)
