Beginning Monday, California employers will be barred from discriminating against employees who use marijuana in their off hours.
Assembly Bill 2188 requires employers to change how they test for marijuana use among employees, using tests that show current impairment and not just past usage. The law carves out some exceptions, such as for those who work in the construction trades.
“Technology to test for marijuana impairment has actually advanced quite a bit, so basically employers can now just test for THC — the psychoactive component in cannabis — and that can show impairment,” said Los Angeles-based attorney Bernard Alexander in a statement. “Most of the older tests detect the non-psychoactive metabolites, which can stay in a person’s system for weeks. So, a worker can test positive when they’re not high or impaired at all.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2188 into law in September 2022, but a provision of the law prevented it from going into effect until Jan. 1, 2024.
The bill was championed by California NORML, a marijuana advocacy organization, which said in a statement that “not a single, scientifically controlled FDA study has shown cannabis metabolite testing to be effective in improving workplace safety or productivity. Studies indicate that metabolite tests for past use of marijuana are useless in protecting job safety.”
The group pointed to a survey of more than 136,000 Canadian workers that found no association between cannabis use and...
Renowned human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, SAN, has criticised President Bola Tinubu for relying on claims by United States President Donald Trump regarding the reported killing of senior Islamic ...