Overhauling Cannabis Workplace Drug Testing: The Shift to Fitness-for-Duty and Post-Hire Testing
The zero-tolerance era is over; fair and equitable testing practices are the new norm.
- By Nina M. French
- Mar 01, 2022
Most Americans now support cannabis legalization, but workplace drug testing has failed to keep pace with prevailing views and legal realities of cannabis drug testing. Policies and programs that narrowly define company actions for positive drug tests resulted in zero tolerance that is no longer feasible in the age of cannabis reform. But shifting laws and rising numbers of employees who use cannabis are impacting how employers will implement workplace drug testing in the future and when and how they will test. The result is a pivot toward fair and equitable cannabis testing practices and policies that utilize modern technologies.
What Cannabis Positivity Rates Tell Us
Recent data estimate 14.8 million Americans use illegal drugs, and 70 percent of those users are employed. Cannabis is the most used drug in the United States, according to the CDC. These numbers could help explain why industry leaders are seeing a double-digit rise in cannabis positivity rates. Quest Diagnostics’ 2021 Drug Testing Index and Industry Insights report shows a significant increase in positive cannabis test results among oral fluid (35.2 percent), hair (22.5 percent) and urine (16.1 percent) tests.
However, conventional cannabis tests of oral fluid, hair and urine cannot provide the one critical piece of data employers need to make fair decisions—whether employees used cannabis recently and are, therefore, likely to be impaired. The window of peak impairment for cannabis lasts only a few hours after consuming but conventional cannabis tests can return positive results for days, weeks or even months after use.
“Simply put, current cannabis tests do not tell the whole story,” said Jaime Feinberg, Vice President of Partnerships for Insurance, Risk and Safety, at Hound Labs, Inc.
Why Many of Those Positive Cannabis Tests Could be Negative
One of the fundamental issues with cannabis testing stems from the fact that positive results from oral fluid, hair and urine tests do not correlate with recent use and provide very little useful information now that most employees can legally use cannabis. While these tests may indicate an employee has consumed cannabis, they cannot tell employers when that use occurred. Testing policies and technology that remain anchored in the era of zero-tolerance can lead to instances of employees being terminated for a legal activity that has no bearing on performance and job safety if it was consumed outside of work hours.
This article originally appeared in the March 1, 2022 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.