WHY FIRE PEOPLE FOR MEDICAL POT USE?

Even if you use it responsibly, marijuana is the only drug you can
get fired for using legally in California.

Each day, many of Californians show up for work medicated, even hung
over, and the only person the employer can legally fire is the pot smoker.

Christian Hughes managed a senior citizens apartment complex near
Redding for five years. A new company bought the complex and
implemented drug testing. Hughes failed and was fired despite:

Informing his new employer that he used medical marijuana outside the
workplace under his doctor's advice.

A five-year work history with no evidence of impairment on the job.
Residents never even knew he smoked medicinally.

The irony that pot probably made it easier for him to do his job, as
it helped relieve pain from a shattered jaw sustained in a car accident.

Pot helped him get back to work. We want folks to work, don't we?
Christian's new employers saw it differently. But after a month on
unemployment, Christian found similar work with another company at a
facility in Red Bluff.

Christian's biggest mistake: He wasn't using something worse, like
Vicodin, OxyContin or Percocet. Such prescription drugs are far more
dangerous. Over-the-counter allergy medicines warn us not to operate
heavy equipment. Alcohol can have immediate debilitating effects.

In most cases those trace elements in a drug test will get you fired.

The problem: We're conflating usage with impairment.

No impaired employee should be on the job, and employers should be
able to fire an impaired employee if his condition impacts job
performance, jeopardizes the safety of individuals, co-workers or
customers, or puts companies at risk of liability.

But that's not what this is about. Whether it's the 2008 state
Supreme Court ruling allowing employers to fire medicinal users or
federal laws making marijuana illegal no matter the use, what this
really boils down to is zero tolerance based on old-school paradigms,
arcane drug laws, hypocritical prejudices and outright ignorance.

It's a bias based on underlying beliefs within lingering remnants of
society that pot smokers are dopers, hippies and Dorito-munching
deadbeats leeching off the system while listening to Grateful Dead
albums on vinyl.

For instance, the California Chamber of Commerce argues that an
employer's right to maintain a drug-free workplace is critical in
order to protect the safety of all workers and limit exposure to
potentially costly litigation.

Please! What the chamber really thinks is that pot smokers and only
pot smokers are dangerous. Otherwise they'd insist that all
drug-tested employees who show traces of prescription drugs, allergy
medicines and alcohol be subject to firing.

Indeed, they should be subject to termination, if they smoke on the
job, drink on the job, are impaired on the job. Someone who smokes
medicinally after dinner is no more impaired the next morning than
the employee in the afternoon who had a cocktail at lunch. But our
preconceived notions tell us the pot smoker is a subhuman lawbreaker
and the cocktail drinker is a white collar professional.

Christian Hughes wasn't fired for performing tasks made more
dangerous by smoking pot. He was fired simply for smoking pot despite
its medical approval by a licensed physician, its legal protection
under Proposition 215 and his responsible usage as an exceptional employee.

It's not the substance that makes an employee a liability; it's the
behavior that makes the employee a liability. You fire the behavior,
not the drug.

A 2008 bill introduced by then-Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San
Francisco, would have allowed employers to fire workers who were
impaired on the job, but protected employees from being targeted
because of their medical status as marijuana-medicating patients.

"Otherwise," says now-state Sen. Leno, "you might as well have passed
a law that stipulates you can't smoke medical marijuana unless you're
unemployed. That's the logic."

The bill passed both houses of the Legislature, but Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger vetoed it. Leno says he'll try again with a newly
elected governor.

Back when I went to work for ABC News, I took a drug test. In
private, I took the cup handed to me by the attendant and poured in a
bottle of warm apple juice. I immediately felt better knowing this
would befuddle some poor lab technician.

It didn't get that far.

With a quizzical look on her face, the attendant held the cup to the
light and said, "My, this sure looks peculiar." I grabbed the cup and
said, "Well, maybe we better run it through again." I drank it, and
the woman shrieked in horror and fainted to the floor.

I still got hired.

I don't do drugs, don't smoke or drink. But targeting pot smokers
just because they're pot smokers is beyond unfair.

If we think it ludicrous to suspend a third-grader for bringing nail
clippers to school, then it's equally absurd to fire someone for
traces of pot smoked at home despite a job history showing no
evidence of impairment at work.

Let's address the abuse and not the use of a drug -- any drug. We're
smart enough to know the difference.