Reefer Madness: Funeral Director May Seek Reasonable Accommodation for Off Duty Medical Marijuana Use March 30, 2019

On March 27, 2019, the New Jersey Appellate Division in Wild v. Carriage Funeral Holdings Inc. reversed the dismissal of an action under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD) alleging failure to accommodate out-of-office use of medical marijuana for cancer treatment. The Court held that New Jersey Compassionate Use Act’s mandate that employers need not accommodate medical marijuana users in the workplace does not foreclose an action under the LAD when the employee was suffering from a disability and was not seeking to use marijuana during work.

Background Facts

Justin Wild, a licensed funeral director, was employed by Carriage Funeral Holdings (Carriage). In 2015, Wild was diagnosed with cancer and was prescribed medical marijuana as part of his treatment. In May 2016, while working, Wild was in a car accident and was taken to an emergency room. Wild disclosed to the hospital that he had a license to use medical marijuana. Because Wild did not appear to be under the influence of marijuana at the time, the treating physician declined to perform a blood test.

The trial court dismissed Wild’s LAD and defamation claims, citing the New Jersey Compassionate Use Act’s mandate that that nothing “require[s] . . . an employer to accommodate the medical use of marijuana in any workplace.” N.J.S.A. 24:6I-14.

Appellate Division Reverses and Allows Wild His Day In Court: Because the case arrived after a motion to dismiss, the Appellate Division was constrained to accept as true Wild’s allegations. In this context, the Appellate Division held, Wild plainly pleaded the prima facie elements of a LAD claim: he alleged that he was disabled because he had cancer, he was able to continue to work as a funeral director, and that his employment was terminated.

Bottom Line: As norms evolve with respect to the use of marijuana for medicinal and recreational purposes, employers must be extremely careful with respect to employee use of marijuana. In New Jersey, the Compassionate Use Act allows employers to prohibit the use of medical marijuana at work and do not need to accommodate marijuana use at-work. The Wild decision is a reminder for employers to engage in the interactive process and exercise caution if an employee is using marijuana outside of work and is not under the influence on the job. Termination of an employee solely on that basis will be problematic and may lead to liability under the LAD.

For complete article — Marijuana Mayhem — Employees need to be sober to work!

Marijuana and psychosis: Real data, real bad

April 2019  By , Op-Ed Contributors

The pitfalls and perils of marijuana legalization are well-documented. But whenever we discuss that research here on BreakPoint, we’re accused of not having the right research. What that means is that we’ve used studies that contradict the very vocal advocates of weed.

Well, let’s see what happens when we cite The British journal The Lancet, which, along with the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, is considered the “gold standard” for peer-reviewed medical research. It doesn’t get more “real” than being published in The Lancet.

A just-published study in The Lancet involving, among others, researchers at King’s College London, compared 900 people who had been treated for psychosis with 1,200 people who had not. Sample participants were drawn from across Europe and Brazil.

By “high-potency” the researchers meant marijuana with a THC content of more than ten percent. To put that figure in context, a study of the weed seized by the DEA between 1995 and 2014 found the THC content went from about 4 percent in 1995 to 12 percent in 2014.

Today, it’s not uncommon to read of marijuana that’s legally-sold in places like Colorado with THC content above 20 percent, occasionally 30 percent! Legalization advocates minimize the exponential growth in potency by saying that twenty or more years ago, Americans didn’t have access to “the good stuff.”

Well, that misses the point by several astronomical units. The point is that those people who daily use “the good stuff” are five times more likely to find themselves in a hospital suffering from delusions and hallucinations, to name only two symptoms of psychosis.

Now, critics will respond, “That’s correlation, not causation.” And that’s the criticism leveled at journalist Alex Berenson, author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence,” a book I recommend highly. But as I heard Berenson say just last week in Denver, of course it’s correlation and not causation. The only way to prove causation would be to ask half a sample group to experiment with something that may harm them. That’s not ethically possible. By the way, all the studies that made us believe that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer were correlated studies too, but that was enough to convince us all.

Even so, writer Ron Powers doesn’t need a peer-reviewed study to convince him of the link between marijuana use and psychosis. In his 2017 book, “Nobody Cares About Crazy People,” he tells the moving story of his two sons, Dean and Kevin, who were both diagnosed with schizophrenia in their late teens.

As Powers tells readers, while there is a strong genetic component to schizophrenia, there is no “schizophrenia gene.” Instead, it’s a constellation of genetic and environmental factors that make people susceptible to schizophrenia. One of these, as Powers painfully learned, is heavy marijuana use, especially in the teenage years.

Of course, some people will tell you that they and most people aren’t mentally ill, so there’s little if any risk. But for a host of reasons, no one can know that with certainty. In fact, all pronouncements about how safe marijuana legalization is simply overstates the case.

For complete story Weed is REALLY BAD!