Marijuana Testing For Job Applicants May Soon Be Banned In NYC

NEW YORK — Pot-smoking New Yorkers may not have to worry so much about finding work as the state moves closer to legalizing the drug. The New York City Council passed a bill Tuesday to ban most employers from requiring job applicants to take drug tests for marijuana.

The move would put the drug on par with alcohol and scale back a practice that only serves as a barrier to employment for many, said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, the bill's sponsor. Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration fully backs the bill, a mayoral spokeswoman said.

"This is not a permission to come to work high, it is not permission to come to work impaired, but we are not speaking about that," Williams, a Democrat, said Tuesday. "We are speaking about people who are prevented from going to work in the first place."

Drug testing is common among private employers and required for some public-sector jobs. Some 57 percent of employers drug-test all job candidates, a 2011 Society for Human Resource Management survey found.

But more companies have recently moved away from checking for marijuana because it shuts too many people out of the labor pool amid a glut of openings and the expanding legalization of the drug, the Associated Press reported last year.

The council bill would specifically ban most public and private employers from requiring potential employees to take a test for the presence of tetrahydrocannabinols, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The legislation would not apply to a wide range of positions, including police and law-enforcement jobs, gigs requiring the supervision of children and those that need a commerical driver's license.

The bill also would not apply to jobs tied to state or federal contracts, as Williams said the city cannot pre-empt state or federal law. Williams said the exceptions grew out of the negotiations to move the legislation forward, but he wants to see them changed in the future.

"If you ingest weed in whatever manner a month ago, I'm not sure how that prevents you from doing your job now," he said.

Criminal-justice reform advocates applauded the Council for taking a step to remove an artificial obstacle to employment. But they called on state lawmakers to get rid of more testing restrictions — and to legalize marijuana altogether.

Drug testing "does little to determine how a particular person would perform in their job," said Dionna King, a policy manager with the Drug Policy Alliance. "It’s just a way to eliminate people based on actions done in private that don’t really affect how they will show up as day-to-day employees."