A drug-testing panel is one of those things a company builds once and rarely revisits. Ours had been on autopilot for several years. This past spring, FlexTrades’ Legal, Human Resources, Sales, Recruiting, and Safety teams sat down and asked a practical question: does every line on our drug-testing panel still do what we think it does?

For marijuana, the answer was no. So we changed it.

The Law Moved Underneath Us

A growing number of states do more than permit recreational marijuana use. They affirmatively protect lawful off-duty use, and they limit what an employer may do with a positive test, including whether an employer may test for marijuana at all. Some of those states include carve-outs for safety-sensitive positions. Some don’t.

That’s a meaningful shift. In those states, declining to hire an otherwise qualified technician because of a positive marijuana screen isn’t a simple safety decision anymore. It’s a hiring decision that certain state laws may treat as unlawful.

There’s a second problem, and it’s the one that bothers me most as a lawyer who cares about safety outcomes. A standard marijuana screen doesn’t measure impairment. It detects metabolites that can linger in the human body for days or even weeks after use. A positive result may tell you something about a technician’s activities last Saturday, but it tells you nothing about whether they’re safe to run a press on Tuesday morning. We were spending money and losing qualified people for a data point that wasn’t answering the safety question we actually cared about.

Our Decision Rule

We landed somewhere deliberately narrow:

  • We stop testing for marijuana in states that protect off-duty use without a safety-sensitive carve-out.
  • We continue testing where a client requires it and state law permits both the test and action based on the result.
  • Federally regulated safety-sensitive roles are unaffected. Where DOT or FAA rules apply, we test exactly as those rules require. That isn’t ours to modify, and we wouldn’t want it to be.

Requests involving state medical cannabis programs are handled individually, under the accommodation process that applies in the relevant state. Everything else on the panel stays. This was a change to one substance, not a retreat from our strict screening process.

In practice, this means our screening instructions now have to match the state, the role, and the client requirement before a candidate is sent for testing. That extra step is intentional. It keeps us compliant without lowering the standard we expect on the floor.

What Did Not Change: The Safety Standard on the Floor

This is the point I most want our technicians and clients to hear directly.

If you work for FlexTrades, you are still expected to show up fit for duty, every shift. Reporting to a job site impaired, whether by marijuana, alcohol, or anything else, is a terminable offense, and it always has been. Removing a pre-hire screen doesn’t change that.

What actually protects you on the floor are the safeguards that stayed in place: reasonable-suspicion testing, post-incident testing, and supervisor training on what impairment looks like. On top of that, we negotiate site rules and review safety training with each client before you ever set foot on their worksite. We also coordinate directly with each client on their fitness-for-duty expectations and enforce them. If someone is impaired at work, we address it quickly.

You should be able to work next to somebody operating a forklift, a crane, or a torch and not have to wonder. That’s the commitment. A pre-employment marijuana screen was just not the thing delivering it.

For Our Clients

This doesn’t change what you require of us, subject to what state law allows. We confirm your testing requirements at intake, and where you require full-panel screening and the law permits it, we run it. Navigating these requirements is one of the ways FlexTrades serves as a compliance partner to our clients. Our team continuously monitors changes in state employment laws, drug-testing regulations, and industry-specific requirements so clients can be confident that their workforce solutions align with both applicable legal obligations and workplace safety expectations. If you’d like to talk through how a specific site is handled, please just ask.

That said, this is not a one-size-fits-all change. Some clients operate under requirements that are more restrictive than state default rules, and some sites involve regulatory obligations that require us to keep full-panel testing in place. Where those requirements apply and the law allows them, we follow them.

The Bottom Line

Good compliance isn’t about keeping every rule you’ve ever written. It’s about evaluating whether the rule is still doing its job. Marijuana screening was costing us qualified technicians and creating legal exposure while contributing almost nothing to whether our people were safe at work. FlexTrades’ reasonable-suspicion and post-incident program does that work. Qualified technicians working in a safe environment continue to be the value we deliver to our clients.

Standard lawyer’s caveat: This is general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, please consult your own counsel.