Position paper: Workplace Drug Testing
Summary
This paper, authored by Dr Sean Mulcahy, sets out Cannabis Council Australia's position on current arrangements for workplace drug testing in the context of legally prescribed medicinal cannabis. It looks at the limitations of current arrangements, including the problems with universally applied testing regimes, the risk of perpetuating stigma and why testing for presence rather than impairment is discriminatory toward medicinal cannabis patients.
Because it is difficult to measure the impairment of drugs compared with alcohol, most workplaces deploy a presence-based (as opposed to “level”-based) approach to drug testing. Workplace drug testing regimes therefore raise important human rights issues because they allow workers to be dismissed if traces of specific substances, such as cannabis, are detected at any level. There is no need, in other words, to establish whether the worker was impaired while working, or to establish the presence of a substance over a specific threshold, as is the case with blood alcohol concentration tests. Specifically in relation to medical cannabis, research has found that ‘medical cannabis may have minimal acute impact on cognitive function when prescribed and used as directed.’ These features have led some to question whether workplace drug testing regimes are proportionate and justifiable, and if they in fact violate human rights.
