Workplaces Should Prepare For Legal Pot

Voters in eight states this week approved measures related to legal marijuana use, and experts say employers in those states should be quick to write up rules and procedures on how to deal with the issue. Recreational use was approved in California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nevada, with only Arizona voting it down. Medical marijuana was approved by Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota. “It’s going to be a necessary component of employee handbooks,” Tad A. Delvin, a partner with Kaufman Dolowich & Voluck LLP, told Business Insider. Employee training will be “critically important” as well. “I would recommend it be a part of mandatory training for managers, and rank and file executives, so it’s a top-down, bottom-up understanding of how the company does business.” Employers are still free to have a zero-tolerance policy, according to Danielle S. Urban, partner with Fisher & Phillips LLP in Denver. But consider whether that policy is rooted in safety, said Hanan B. Kolko with Meyer Suozzi, English & Klein P.C. “If you’re an employer that needs to hire young people, you need to be realistic about your workforce, and if you’re going to be hiring lots of 23-year-old computer programmers and coders, then you have to decide whether you want a rule that’s going to make it hard to hire them.”