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, “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” In reality, it is probably a consequence of lawsuits brought against Amazon in the past few years due to discriminatory practices against people using state-legal marijuana—in particular the case of a New Jersey man fired for using medical marijuana prescribed to him.
Major Win for Reform
Regardless of the motive behind this change of heart, this is a major win for cannabis reform. Amazon has an annual revenue equivalent to the GDP of Norway, and it holds massive sway over American politics. To please Amazon, local, state and even the federal governments routinely bend over backwards, going so far as bending the law to offer massive tax breaks to the mega corporation.
Now that Amazon has chosen the pro-marijuana camp, they will lobby Congress to force cannabis reform through, the company announced. “Because we know that this issue is bigger than Amazon, our public policy team will be actively supporting The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021 (MORE Act)—federal legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge criminal records, and invest in impacted communities. We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law.”
The MORE Act, which passed the House last year before being killed by Republicans, would not mandate the federal legalization of marijuana, but it would remove the plant from the list of controlled substances, effectively allowing each state to self-regulate. It would also greatly alleviate repression even in states that refuse to allow marijuana use and commerce, and it would lead to the expungement of hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of criminal records for nonviolent offenders.
This does not mean that Amazon will start selling or delivering marijuana products. As it stands, cannabis is still federally banned, even in states where the ban is not enforced due to state and local laws contradicting federal law. To sell or even handle marijuana for delivery in places where it is legal, Amazon would need licenses for themselves and their delivery drivers, which is more trouble than it’s worth—for now. If the company’s lobbying bears fruit, and if we see federal legalization take place in the near future, Amazon might be able to handle cannabis like it handles alcohol, by absorbing local licensed retailers and offering delivery through associates. That might really be the end goal, a world where you could get kush delivered to your door after a few clicks on Amazon. Here’s to hoping.
