High Maintenance: The number of U.S. workers testing positive for cannabis increased by 10.3%.
getty imagesU.S. workers set a 25-year record in testing positive for marijuana use. Here's why the results are misleading.
By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff
As
cannabis legalization has spread across the country, a record number of American workers tested positive for cannabis use, according to a new report released by lab testing giant Quest Diagnostics. In its annual Drug Testing Index, Quest Diagnostics reported that marijuana positivity increased by 10.3% in the previous year (from 3.9% in 2021 to 4.3% in 2022). Overall, positivity tests increased 8.3% during the same period (from 3.6% to 3.9%) in states where medical marijuana is legal and 11.8% year over year (from 5.1% in 2021 to 5.7% in 2022) in states where recreational marijuana is legal.
But that doesn’t mean those American workers who tested positive were actually stoned on the job. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component in cannabis, is lipophilic, which means it is stored in the body’s fat and a person can test positive for marijuana for weeks after using it. For this reason, urine tests cannot determine if a person is high at the moment of the test.
Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, says the Quest Diagnostics study “is misleading” and “just means more people are using cannabis” in general—not necessarily while on the clock.
“The significance is that the only legal option for nearly a century has been alcohol. And now that people have a legitimate legal choice to alcohol, people are going to be discovering cannabis,” he says. “So it's completely not surprising if more people are using cannabis, because it's now a legal option. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as they’re using it safely.”
Currently, 22 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational use for adults 21 years and older, while 38 states have legal medical marijuana programs.
Dr. Grinspoon, who has specialized in medical cannabis for more than 25 years and recently published a book, Seeing Through the Smoke, has tremendous experience with drug testing. He was tested for five years during his own battle with addiction, and years later he managed drug tests for doctors while working for nonprofit Physician Health Services Inc. Now, he administers drug tests for patients who come to him for addiction treatment.
“If you have a positive urine test for cannabis, all that means is that you use cannabis within the last two to three weeks—it has no implication that you've been that you've been impaired before work or even within the last 72 hours,” Dr. Grinspoon explains. “The problem is they don't have a test for impairment. With cannabis, you could use it and a month later you come up positive; it sticks around forever.”
And intoxication from cannabis—as with alcohol or any substance—is the main concern with the rising workplace positivity rates. Last year, 7.3% of post-accident urine screens came back positive for THC, a 9% increase from 2021. Since 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational cannabis sales, the number of post-accident urine tests that came back positive for pot jumped an alarming 204.2%.
From 2002 to 2009, a period of time when only 14 states had legalized medical marijuana sales and none had legal recreational markets, Quest Diagnostics says that the number of post-accident tests that came back positive for marijuana declined. Even though cannabis is still federally illegal, many employers have stopped or minimized screening for weed. The biggest example is Amazon, which announced it would stop testing many potential employees for marijuana unless their jobs were regulated by the Department of Transportation. The National Basketball Association is negotiating with the players’ union to remove cannabis as a prohibited drug. According to a recent poll conducted by the ClearanceJobs and the Intelligence and National Security Foundation (INSF), 30% of people between ages 18 and 30 either won’t apply to government jobs or withdrawn an application due to strict marijuana policies. The FBI and CIA have also relaxed their rules around drug testing.
But Kevin Sabet, the president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a nonprofit that opposes legalization, believes the Quest Diagnostics report is a bad omen. “There's been a generational shift in marijuana use to a level of consumption that we haven't seen in a very, very long time,” says Sabet. “I think it's worrisome that we're seeing this, especially at our workplaces and in safety sensitive positions, putting other people at risk.”
Sabet admits that a positive test doesn’t mean that someone is intoxicated at the time, but he feels that the increase in the number of people smoking weed speaks to a greater cultural and societal reckoning America needs to consider.
“The issue is whether we think it's okay to be a stoned society or not, whether we think it's okay that people are literally spending days and days and days under the influence of marijuana,” Sabet says. “As a country, we need to really think about at what cost, you know, what, at what costs Are we bearing for this moment right now? And I think that's something we haven't really discussed.”
As for Grinspoon, he sees this kind of viewpoint as one “based on moral panic, not the science.” The only thing a positive urine test can definitively say is that a person consumed marijuana at some point this month. In his book, he writes:“As such, ‘zero tolerance’ laws, where you get into criminal difficulty if you have any cannabis in your system, are more about persecuting cannabis users than promoting public safety.”
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