HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH WORKPLACE IMPAIRMENT?

SOLUTION: SET CLEAR POLICIES, WORK WITH EMPLOYEES AND WAIT FOR BETTER SCIENCE

Before cannabis became legal a year ago there were a lot of questions. Would people be smoking it in the street? Would people be driving high all the time? Would employees get stoned on their breaks? In reality, not much changed, especially in workplaces. Some employers simply said: “Don’t show up to work impaired.” But others imposed rules on how long employees must abstain from using cannabis before coming to work, a few setting the bar at 30 days with zero tolerance. Is it a problem? Chris King, an employment lawyer with McInnes Cooper in St. John’s said “health and safety is the primary driver for all of this.” Policies are driven by the nature of the job, how safety sensitive a workplace is and to what extent the employer can tolerate risk. Each case is very different and very fact specific so there’s no real blanket answer that they can offer to any employer, King said. Derek Hogan, CEO of WorkplaceNL, who works with employers and employees to promote health and safety said it’s all about impairment. “We do know that use of cannabis can impair an individual’s memory, judgment, and motor skills, particularly as they’re using the product, so that’s really the starting point for this,” Hogan said. “As it would be if you showed up drunk at work from consuming alcohol.”

MEASURING IMPAIRMENT

Dr. John Weber is an associate pharmacy professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and gives seminars on impairment and marijuana in the workplace. He said one of the main questions he gets from employers is how long impairment lasts and how you know if someone is impaired. The problem is that there’s no real way to know that right now. “When you test positive for cannabis it doesn’t correlate with recent use, it could’ve been several weeks ago, it could’ve been a few days ago (and) you don’t have the impairing effects anymore,” he said. He said current data suggest impairment generally lasts between two to four hours, but for some people it can last up to six hours. Significant impairment can be obvious, he said, much like alcohol, and he feels it should largely be treated the same way. “If someone wants to smoke a joint at night, I’m talking someone in a typical 9-to-5 job, the same way they would drink a glass of wine or something like that, they wake up the next day, they are not impaired,” he said. “I also don’t think someone should be smoking a joint on a lunch break.” King agrees that there’s a lot of work to be done on measuring impairment. “We don’t even know in 2019 if a certain level of THC in the blood shows impairment,” he said. What’s next? “I think that some of the workplace policies that we see in 2019 will be very different in 2025,” King said. “That just has to do with the evolution of the medical science that measures impairment.” Hogan agreed, saying that polices have to be reviewed and as more medical science and evidence comes in on cannabis he’s sure some may change. Weber said large-scale controlled studies are needed to better measure cannabis impairment. “Right now we just can’t unequivocally say that there’s a number, like 10 nanograms per millilitre, and say that someone is impaired,” Weber said. It’s probably going to be at least five years before we’re there.”