Marijuana at City Hall
By William Kirchhoff and Stephen Zimney
The legalization of marijuana has stirred hot debate on both sides of the issue. According to ProCon.org, some 20 states and the District of Columbia have currently made medical marijuana legal, and there is every indication that more will follow. Until just recently, local governments could adopt a position on its use at the workplace that held—as long as the federal government considered marijuana illegal—they need not spend time or energy trying to proactively deal with the issue. There was little to do except to maintain a zero-tolerance stand.
The game, however, has now changed. No longer will public managers be able to use previously existing case law to delay or deflect facing the medical marijuana issues head-on.
With Attorney General Eric Holder’s August 2013 announcement that the federal government will no longer prosecute or incarcerate users, we coauthors submit this prediction: In those states where the use of medical marijuana is legal, managers and all government officials will be confronted with the pressing reality that employees will want, and in many cases demand, that they be allowed
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to treat certain medical conditions with medical marijuana, both on and off the job. It’s also likely that other states will follow, given current societal trends.
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it will hopefully generate additional study and debate, since across-theboard conclusions are hard to draw. Be it the differences in political and cultural realities or the array of actions taken by localities in a given state against which others will be compared, we suspect that each administration will face the need to customize its thinking regarding marijuana adaptation protocols.
The second purpose is to provide local government managers with the framework that will allow them to begin dealing with this complex issue. In no way does this article advocate for or against the use of medical marijuana. That discussion is left to physicians and scientists.
But the article does postulate that managers will have to wrestle with the practicalities, friction points, and dilemmas associated with the use of medical marijuana in the workplace. It also offers suggestions on how to practically and strategically address medical marijuana at city hall.
SOUTH DAKOTA MUNICIPALITIES
