Following a company drug test, Brandon Coats lost his job because he tested positive for marijuana:
“I’m not going to get better any time soon,” paraplegic plaintiff Brandon Coats told reporters after his 2010 firing by Dish Network was upheld in a precedent-setting Colorado Court of Appeals case last April. “I need the marijuana, and I don’t want to go the rest of my life without holding a job.” As the Denver Post reported, Coats alleged he was illegally fired by the cable company Dish Network for using medical marijuana to mitigate muscle spasms. (Coats was fired three years before Colorado voters legalized recreational marijuana use; his case rested on the state’s Medical Marijuana Amendment, which went into effect in 2009.) Dish did not respond to Salon’s Thursday morning inquiry.
“If Mr. Coats can’t win this case, then nobody can,” Coats’ attorney Michael Evans told Salon. “He’s about as bad as you can get in terms of physical disability … He was a great employee, and they admit that he was never impaired [at work] … He was following all of the laws.”
Now that regreational marijuana is legal in Colorado, Andrew Cohen anticipates more stories like Coats:
Coats has a legal right to ingest cannabis for medicinal purposes but no legal right to have his employer recognize that right in a way that provides him with a reasonable remedy.
In this way his case and his cause have forced state and local officials to confront another one of the truths that surrounds this story. It is not just another court fight over the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees, although it surely is that, as well. It’s also about figuring out a way for the law to account fairly for the different rates at which alcohol and marijuana leave the human body. Alcohol comes and goes in a matter of hours or days. THC can stay for weeks.
And that means, for now anyway, a Colorado employee can get drunk as a skunk on a Saturday night and have no fear on Monday of losing her job to a drug test so long as she shows up sober and ready to work. And it means that the employee’s coworker cannot have even a puff of pot on that same Saturday night without fearing that a subsequent drug test will cost her a job, even if she also shows up sober and ready to work on the following Monday. That’s a patent inequality that is as easy to explain as it is difficult to justify: a “zero-tolerance” drug policy that employers conveniently apply to some lawful drugs but not to others.
The Dish 