Marijuana just got an unlikely ally: Amazon. In an unexpected announcement, Amazon’s leadership revealed that the retail giant will stop drug testing for marijuana and will start supporting cannabis reform.
“In the past, like many employers, we’ve disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use. However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we’ve changed course,” announced Dave Clark, lieutenant of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We will no longer include marijuana in our comprehensive drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation, and [we] will instead treat it the same as alcohol use.”
Due to the pandemic boosting the need for online shopping, Amazon hired an additional 500,000 workers in 2020 to meet the demand, nearly doubling their workforce. Amazon is now one of the U.S.’s (and one of the world’s) biggest employers, with no less than 1.3 million regular employees and hundreds of thousands of temporary and seasonal workers. This will greatly reduce the number of American workers being denied employment for benign and often state-legal cannabis use—particularly unskilled and temporary workers who often suffer from drug testing at disproportionate rates. Drivers will be excluded from this new policy to avoid impairment behind the wheel.
This decision, according to Amazon, is due to the company’s desire to be, in their own words,…
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Marijuana just got an unlikely ally: Amazon. In an unexpected announcement, Amazon’s leadership revealed that the retail giant will stop drug testing for marijuana and will start supporting cannabis reform.
“In the past, like many employers, we’ve disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use. However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we’ve changed course,” announced Dave Clark, lieutenant of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “We will no longer include marijuana in our comprehensive drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation, and [we] will instead treat it the same as alcohol use.”
Due to the pandemic boosting the need for online shopping, Amazon hired an additional 500,000 workers in 2020 to meet the demand, nearly doubling their workforce. Amazon is now one of the U.S.’s (and one of the world’s) biggest employers, with no less than 1.3 million regular employees and hundreds of thousands of temporary and seasonal workers. This will greatly reduce the number of American workers being denied employment for benign and often state-legal cannabis use—particularly unskilled and temporary workers who often suffer from drug testing at disproportionate rates. Drivers will be excluded from this new policy to avoid impairment behind the wheel.
This decision, according to Amazon, is due to the company’s desire to be, in their own words,…
