Anyone know if a California state employee who is subject to drug-testing for work (fireman or police officer possibly?) who has a medical marijuana prescription is given a pass for testing positive?
What about someone on parole/probation who is drug tested by the court—If they get a prescription are they allowed to smoke at will?
No. Federal law supersedes state law, and the law holds that possession of marijuana is a crime. I don’t think there’s any nuance to this.
True, but the OP isn’t talking about federal workers or parolees. The State of California has no obligation to enforce federal laws.
Under no obligation to enforce federal law still doesn’t make it legal.
Perhaps the OP wishes to ask if the state will fire them for smoking prescribed marijuana. That seems more like the intent of the question to me.
HD, you are right----I should have used clearer wording in my OP.
Here’s a link to the state’s drug policy. It says nothing about any such exemptions, so I think we can assume the answer is no.
That’s not how medical marijuana works in California. You don’t need a prescription for it. Regardless, the terms of probation/parole would supersede the existence of a prescription. I suppose one could petition the court to allow marijuana use for medical reasons while on parole or probation. Good luck with that.
I’m going to leave the parole/ probation issue completely aside, but in terms of employment there are some issues worth mentioning.
First, the examples you give are of safety-sensitive jobs. Such employees would usually be required to report any legal prescription or nonprescription drug use that could affect them on the job. So their use of medical marijuana would probably need to be disclosed before it showed up on a test, and failure to disclose itself could be cause for disciplinary action.
So you would want to consider public safety jobs separately from clerks in the register of deeds office.
Second, there is the question of whether the medical review officer would report the test as positive if the medical marijuana use was disclosed in advance of the test. This is what an employee is expected to do if he is taking legal prescription drugs that could show up on a drug test. Our last thread on this topic made it clear that outside of California, the MRO would report this as positive, even if the use had been legal in California. But I think we stopped short of getting an answer to whether a California MRO would report it as positive.
Third, there is the issue of whether the the State of California could give the employee a pass, and whether they would have to give the employee a pass. It seems like the federal law would mean they didn’t have to give the employee a pass. But whether they could give the employee a pass without undermining its own policy, especially in the case of, say, a clerk who management knew had been a great employee while battling terminal cancer, is less clear to me.