What employers need to know about "guided use" of cannabis

While much stigma and confusion around cannabis use still remains (especially for those who grew up in the 80’s “Just Say No” era), the fact is that cannabis is now legal in most states. Ninety-four percent of U.S. adults live in a state where medical cannabis is legal, and more than 50% live in a state where both medical and recreational use is legal.

For HR pros, that means most of your employees can use cannabis legally. That’s leading to changing societal views, and making some employer policies relating to cannabis use obsolete.

Now consider that overall legal cannabis sales in the U.S. are in the $33B range in total, and it is estimated that a third of those sales are for health and medical purposes. That’s $10B in spending annually, putting cannabis spend on par with the top non-COVID medications prescribed in the U.S. in 2022 (drugs like Humira, Keytruda and Eliquis). The biggest difference is that people are self prescribing cannabis. There is not a  clinician checking for multi-drug interactions or guiding patient use of cannabis use at all.