Massachusetts Lawmakers Approve Bill To Provide Employment Protections For Marijuana Consumers

Massachusetts lawmakers have advanced a bill to provide employment protections for people who use marijuana.

Members of the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development on Friday passed the legislation from Rep. Chynah Tyler (D), sending it to the House Steering, Policy and Scheduling Committee for further consideration.

This comes about two months after a separate committee passed a similar employment protections bill from Rep. Michael Kushmerek (D).

Under the proposal that advanced on Friday, employers would be barred from requiring a drug test for cannabis until a conditional offer is made. Even then, the measure states that employers may not “directly or indirectly solicit or require an employee or prospective employee to submit to testing for the presence of marijuana in his or her system as a condition of employment.”

Qualifying medical marijuana patients would also be afforded specific protections.

Employers could not “refuse to hire, terminate from employment, penalize, fail to promote, or otherwise take adverse employment action against an individual based upon the individual’s status as a qualifying patient unless the individual used, possessed, or was impaired by marijuana at the individual’s place of employment or during the hours of employment.”

“A qualifying patient’s failure to pass an employer-administered drug test for marijuana components or metabolites may not be used as a basis for employment-related decisions unless reasonable suspicion exists that the qualified patient was impaired by marijuana at the qualifying patient’s place of employment or during the hours of employment,” the bill text says.

There are exceptions built into the legislation. It would not, for example, require employers to “permit or accommodate the use, consumption, possession, transfer, display, transportation, sale, or growing of marijuana in the workplace or at any time during employment.”

Also, the protections would not apply in situations where drug tests for marijuana are mandated under a federal employment contract. Employers could also continue to screen for cannabis for designated “safety sensitive” positions.

In the background of this legislative effort, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office last week confirmed it has been receiving complaints from the public about petitioners for a 2026 ballot initiative aimed at rolling back the state’s marijuana legalization law–with a growing number of people alleging that signature collectors are peddling misleading information about the proposal.

The marijuana repeal campaign, for its part, said last month that they’re “on track” to securing enough signatures to place the initiative on the ballot. They’re working to submit 100,000 signatures by a December 3 deadline.

Meanwhile, the head of Massachusetts’s marijuana regulatory agency recently suggested that the measure to effectively recriminalize recreational cannabis sales could imperil tax revenue that’s being used to support substance misuse treatment efforts and other public programs.

Whether the cannabis measures make the cut is yet to be seen. Voters approved legalization at the ballot in 2016, with sales launching two years later. And the past decade has seen the market evolve and expand. As of August, Massachusetts officials reported more than $8 billion in adult-use marijuana sales.

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Regulators are also working to finalize rules to allow for a new cannabis consumption lounge license type, which they hope to complete by October.

Separately, in May CCC launched an online platform aimed at helping people find jobs, workplace training and networking opportunities in the state’s legal cannabis industry.

State lawmakers have also been considering setting tighter restrictions on intoxicating hemp-derived products and a plan to allow individual entities to control a larger number of cannabis establishments.

Also in Massachusetts, legislators who were working on a state budget butted heads with CCC officials, who’ve said they can’t make critical technology improvements without more money from the legislature.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts lawmakers recently approved a bill to establish a pilot program for the regulated therapeutic use of psychedelics. And two committees have separately held hearings to discuss additional psilocybin-related measures.