State Bill To Protect Working Medical Marijuana Patients
A new Assembly bill was introduced this week to help protect medical marijuana users jobs. The bill is designed to prohibit discrimination against marijuana patients who use their medicine away from the workplace. Now, by no means can a patient use marijuana while on the job but this will stop people from getting fired who use medical marijuana responsibly away from the workplace to help their ailments.
The bill is Co-authored by two Bay area assembly men, Marc Leno D-San Francisco and Loni Hancock D-Berkley, as well as Patty Berg D-Eureka and Lori Saldana D-San Diego. The reason this team gathered to write this bill is stemmed from a court case from last month.
In Ross v. RagingWire a 46 year old medical marijuana patient, Gary Ross, took his employer to court for being fired because of a positive drug test. On Jan 24th the State Supreme court ruled 5-2 in favor of the defendant, RagingWire.
The bill is being backed by Americans for Safe Access, a national marijuana advocacy group. The ASA has been against discriminatory firing over medical marijuana use for some time. They have even called out such employers as Costco, UPS, Foster Farms Dairy, DirecTV, the San Joaquin Courier, Power Auto Group and several construction companies, hospitals, and trade union employers for either firing medical marijuana patients, threatening jobs, as well as preventing employment all together.
You can find the whole bill here http://safeaccessnow.org/downloads/AB2279.pdf if you would like to look at it more closely. This is another great step forward for California medical marijuana patients.