Marijuana Card Holder Sues Over Job Loss | Arkansas Business News

A medical marijuana card holder is suing a hospital system in northwest Arkansas for withdrawing a job offer after testing positive for pot and saying he is not alone.

Washington County’s Balance “Lance” Reed is seeking class action against Springdale’s Northwest Arkansas Hospitals LLC, which operates multiple hospitals including Willow Creek Women’s Hospital and Northwest Medical Center-Bentonville.

Reed said in his lawsuit filed in Washington County Circuit Court earlier this month that he believes there are at least 35 and up to 100 people who are being denied jobs by Northwest Arkansas Hospitals because of their medical marijuana patient status has been.

Under the law, employers can choose not to hire a medical marijuana patient for a “safety-related position,” such as: B. as a truck driver or as a manufacturer of explosives.

“That way, the trucking industry could mark positions as safety-relevant and then not be forced to hire someone for drugs,” said Reed’s attorney Chris W. Burks of WH Law in North Little Rock. “The problem is, a lot of Arkansas employers don’t understand that they need to label this position as safety related … on the front end.”

Burks said there are several employers who believe that if they fail a drug test on a pot they will be able to fire or not hire an employee holding a medical marijuana card, Burks said.

“But that’s not right,” he said. “And the reason you haven’t seen many complaints about it is that most of the companies that make this mistake are smaller.” Burks wants Reed’s complaint to be a “test case” because Northwest Arkansas Hospitals are “a great place to work.”

An employer with more than 500 employees that the defendant has could face a fine of up to $ 300,000 per person per constitutional violation.

“It’s something I think will continue to matter as more people get the cards and more companies come into the state,” said Burks. As of last week, there were nearly 77,000 Arkansas cardholders.

Northwest Arkansas Hospitals announced to Arkansas Business last week that they have no comments on any pending litigation.

Little Rock attorney David Couch, architect of the state’s medical marijuana industry, said he gets more employment calls than anything else. “Arkansas employers are not obeying the law,” said Couch, who is not a party to Reed’s lawsuit.

The general assembly has only classified a limited number of positions as safety-related, he said.

“And discriminating against someone who uses medical marijuana for medical purposes is against that person’s constitutional law in Arkansas because we changed the constitution to include the right to use marijuana for medical purposes,” Couch said.

J. Bruce Cross, a labor and employment management attorney at Cross Gunter Witherspoon & Galchus of Little Rock, advises clients to clearly identify in writing which positions are safety-related. “We recommended doing this in the job description,” he said.

If the job is safety related, the employer could fire employees who fail a marijuana drug test or deny them a job even if they have a medical marijuana card, Cross said.

An employee could also be fired for using medical marijuana at work, even if they have a card.

Reed’s case

Reed applied for a position as Mental Health Psychiatrist 1 at Northwest Hospital-Springdale in February 2020. The position was not classified as security-relevant in the application.

He was offered the job for $ 11 an hour on May 1, 2020, and was due to start in early June. Reed said he told his new employer that he was a medical marijuana patient and would fail a drug test for marijuana use, which also happened.

After Reed tested positive, the hospital said he wasn’t “renting per policy,” the lawsuit said. “Just because the defendant has a drug testing policy and a drug-free workplace doesn’t mean the defendant can decline to hire a medical marijuana patient for a non-safety position based on a positive marijuana test outside of work.”

Reed is moving to have his case certified as a class action lawsuit and seeking unspecified damages from Northwest Arkansas Hospitals.