Marijuana Use Has A Positive Impact On Consumers’ Careers, Poll Says

A majority of marijuana consumers say their use of cannabis has had a “positive” impact on their careers, according to a new poll.

The survey from the medical cannabis telehealth platform NuggMD posed the question: “Has cannabis use had a positive or negative effect on your job or career?”

Fifty-four percent of respondents said their marijuana consumption led to positive developments in their careers, including 28 percent who described it as “very positive.”

Just about 10 percent said using cannabis had a “negative” effect on their jobs, while 36 percent said it had no impact at all.

“Prohibitionists are still trying desperately to sell the fiction that access to cannabis causes workplace amotivation,” Andrew Graham, head of communications at NuggMD, told Marijuana Moment. “Since they all tend to read from the same tired playbook, it would not surprise me if the inverse of that accusation were what’s actually true.”

Via NuggMD.

“That’s not exactly what the polling data here says, but that’s the direction it’s pointing,” he said. “Wellness-focused employers need to get smarter about how today’s workforce uses cannabis, because there’s mounting evidence in favor of taking it seriously as a potential workplace benefit.”

The poll involved interviews with 493 marijuana consumers from July 3-20, with a 4.4 percentage point margin of error.

While the survey itself is a subjective assessment about individual cannabis users’ career experience, it further disrupts the prohibitionist narrative about the potential harms of legalization for the workforce.

Several other studies have touched on the issue in different ways.

For example, in 2021 a partially federally funded study found that adult-use legalization is associated with an increase in workforce productivity and decrease in workplace injuries.

In 2023, researchers involved in a separate study found that workers who use marijuana off the clock are no more likely to experience workplace injuries compared to those who don’t consume cannabis at all, challenging “overly broad” zero-tolerance employment policies.

A more recent study on marijuana legalization’s effect on workers’ compensation found that while the policy change is associated with a “gradual increase” in workers’ comp claims, the average cost per claim in fact fell after the policy change—as did patient use of prescription drugs, especially opioids and other painkillers.

Separately, an analysis last year of five years’ worth of federal health survey data by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that employees in the food service and hospitality industries were some of the most common consumers of marijuana among U.S. workers.

People in arts, design, entertainment, sports and media occupations also reported comparatively high rates of past-month cannabis use, as did workers in construction and extraction. Among those least likely to report marijuana use, meanwhile, were law enforcement, health care providers and workers in libraries and education.

Photo courtesy of Martin Alonso.