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Do We Need a Culture Shift Towards Medicinal Cannabis?

Jon Vought

By: Jon Vought

January 8, 2025

It’s 2025. We’re about 10 years away from the North American fire service being 300 years old. During that time, we’ve progressed in technology, fire codes, engineering, tactics, and more. But in almost 300 years, we’ve only recently started to address mental and physical health.

Our culture today is embracing healthcare solutions that address the root cause of a problem. Older generations want to know why they need to take medication (and if they can go without it), while younger generations want to know why we’re suppressing access to this natural compound with medical use cases: Cannabis.

All the questions that critique its acceptance are valid: How will we write a policy for it? How can we enforce sobriety at work and still have drug testing? How do grants work?

One thing we must keep in mind is this: Of those 300 years in the U.S. fire service, cannabis was legal for more than 200 of those years. We’ve had cannabis far longer than we’ve been without it. It wasn’t until the 1970s when the Controlled Substances Act was created, and random drug testing soon followed (at a national scale, anyway).

Of course, we should address all of those questions, and it would take a true expert in legal matters and/or policy to counsel those in city hall or fire administrations. But I would like to present some compelling common-sense principles for each of these FAQs:

How can we enforce people not being high at work?

Well, let me answer that question with another question: How do we do it now with benzodiazepines? I chose benzos as an example because the way they’re tested in urine is similar to cannabis. It stays in just as long, there’s no level of intoxication set like there is with alcohol, so there’s no way to determine someone is actively intoxicated.

How do we write a policy?

This one seems to be the easiest: Evaluate Pittsburgh Local 1. They’ve had a policy for years, with great success by any measure. Anchorage, Alaska; Boynton Beach, Fla.; and Pasco County, Fla., are all examples of fire departments that recently created policies around recreational and/or medicinal cannabis use.

How do grants work with cannabis policy?

An article by Lexipol published in 2020 and updated in 2022, Can Fire Departments Prohibit Firefighter Off-Duty Medical Marijuana Use?, tackles this question.

Two authors – both fire chiefs, one of whom is also a lawyer – wrote a thorough assessment of the law surrounding this complex issue. Everyone should check it out. In this article, what they write about grants answers the question perfectly: “There is no loss of federal grant funding if a fire department fails to prohibit or impose discipline for employee off-duty medical marijuana use. Put another way, a fire agency that is a federal grant recipient must prohibit the possession and use of medical marijuana in the workplace, but is not required to prohibit possession or firefighter off-duty medical marijuana use.”

What the Law Says

The Drug-Free Workplace Act specifies you must maintain a workplace where employees are not intoxicated by drugs or alcohol. This includes prescription medication, as well as cannabis. It doesn’t tell you what you can’t do when you’re off duty. This was enacted to maintain a drug-free workplace, it doesn’t have jurisdiction over your home.

Certain states have murky laws on whether they’re allowed to discipline you for using medical marijuana off-duty. The summary of this same article addresses that issue with the following:

“Until a court holds that a fire agency may discipline all employees for off-duty use of medical marijuana, or state statutes are revised to provide that they may do so, fire departments risk violating state disability discrimination laws by issuing a blanket drug testing policy prohibiting all firefighter off-duty medical marijuana use in states where the duty to accommodate employees remains unclear.”

This was proven correct in December 2024, when a firefighter in Hillsborough County, Fla., won a lawsuit stating the department and county discriminated against him for terminating him after he failed a drug test while having a medical marijuana card.

Lawsuits Over Cannabis Use

You can see how we can easily get into the weeds over legal issues and policy. Ironically, administrators and fire chiefs often cite legal reasons for withholding cannabis use. However, past precedent would show mounting evidence to the contrary: You’re going to cause more headaches for yourself by prohibiting medical cannabis rather than allowing it. 

Cities or departments aren’t getting sued for allowing cannabis use as of now, but they’ve lost lawsuits or have been ordered to stop drug testing. The New York City Law Department ordered the FDNY to stop testing for THC. 

Buffalo (N.Y.) FD lost a lawsuit two years ago that forced it to rehire an employee it terminated for medical cannabis use. It also changed its cannabis policy, reinstated the employee’s rank to captain, and gave him back pay. If I were a fire chief, I would be much more worried about the legality of my drug testing policy than the legality of medical cannabis.

Death Benefits and Cannabis Use

This is the biggest con to the pros. If you have cannabis in your system and die in the line of duty, your family will not receive a death benefit. This is a huge deal. While at the Redmond Health and Wellness Symposium in 2023, this issue was brought up by members of IAFF Local 1 during their presentation on medical cannabis in the fire service. They did state that rescheduling cannabis from a Schedule 1 (same as heroin) to a Schedule 3 (same as steroids) would allow this death benefit to resume if you had cannabis in your system at the time of your death. But until the federal Government creates guidance on this, we’re all just speculating. It’s important to realize this negative consequence.

How Will it Affect Us on the Job?

I thought about adding another component to this article about how it affects us on the job, but it isn’t logical to argue that point. The reason is there is no argument attempting to justify the use of alcohol, prescription meds, or other intoxicants when off-duty. For those substances, the argument of “we’ll just come to work sober” is somehow sufficient. We don’t need to address this. Cannabis doesn’t produce a hangover, and if used daily, it doesn’t have deadly withdrawals like alcohol or benzos do. The policy is already written. Treat it like a prescription medication and be done with it.

Jon Vought is a firefighter/paramedic with 16 years on the job, currently holding the rank of captain. Jon started Rescue 1 CBD in 2020 to give firefighters the benefits of CBD without failing a drug test, as it’s the only researched CBD brand specific for first responders.

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