Jennifer Roselle and Justine L. Abrams Author Article About Medical Marijuana’s Effect on the Workplace

Firm Counsel Jennifer Roselle and Associate Justine L. Abrams have gotten an article entitled “The Blunt Truth About Marijuana’s Impact on the Workplace” published in the Labor Relations section of the December 2018 issue of New Jersey Municipalities magazine. The article specifies that individuals who use medical marijuana to ease “debilitating medical conditions” are presumably disabled and protected under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination and the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibit adverse employer actions against people on the basis of having disabilities.

The article implies that individuals who use medical marijuana for their conditions have the right to seek reasonable accommodations from their employers, and employers must engage in “interactive processes” with disabled employees and job applicants to determine whether reasonable accommodations exist in their cases. However, reasonable accommodations would not include allowing employees to use marijuana at work or come to work feeling “high.”

Ms. Roselle and Ms. Abrams go on to discuss court cases involving medical marijuana in the workplace and the issues regarding drug testing, random testing, reasonable suspicion testing, post-accident testing, and privacy issues implicated by drug testing. They also point out the importance of employers consulting with labor counsel to ensure compliance with human resource requirements and collective bargaining rights.

To read the entire article, please click here.

Ms. Roselle is Counsel in the firm’s Labor Law, Education Law and Cannabis Law Practice Groups. Ms. Abrams is an Associate in the firm’s Employment Law & Litigation and Cannabis Law Practice Groups and the Human Resource Training & Audit Programs group.