Pew: Marijuana and Workers' Comp

Monday, April 10, 2017 | 0

I read an interesting story on the front page of Yahoo.com titled “ESPN’s NFL player poll about marijuana had some surprising results.” I then read the source article on ESPN.com, “Survey: Two-thirds of NFL players say legal pot equals fewer painkillers.” The title is fairly self-explanatory.

Mark Pew

First, just to ensure we’re on the same page: This is a workers’ compensation issue. The NFL is an employer. The players are employees. The gridiron is a workplace. Pain and injury are realities for the vast majority, if not all, players/employees at some point in their careers.

The survey was of 226 players, 11% of the total number of players on active rosters and practice squads. So I would consider it a statistically significant sample and, depending on how the 226 were selected, likely reflective of the full population.

Following are the highlights as tweeted out by @ESPNNFL:

• Nearly three-quarters of NFL players surveyed (71%) say marijuana should be legal in all states.
• About 1 in 5 (22%) say they’ve known a teammate to use marijuana before a game.
• Two-thirds (67%) say the NFL’s testing system for recreational drugs is not hard to beat.
• When asked which was better for recovery and pain control — marijuana or painkillers — 41% say marijuana, compared with 32% for painkillers.
• More than half (61%) say that, if marijuana were an allowed substance, fewer players would take painkillers.

Do these results scare you? Probably depends on the personal opinion you held before you read them. Do these results surprise you? They shouldn’t. According to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,042 adults in February 2016:

• 61% said marijuana should be legal, and of those:
• 33% with no restrictions.
• 43% with restrictions on purchase amounts.
• 24% only with medical prescription.

Add to those figures the five states (Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada) that voted in November to legalize recreational marijuana. (Legalization was approved in California, Massachusetts, Nevada and Maine — though by such a close vote in Maine that a recount is being requested.)

Add to that four other states (Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota) that approved legalization. All of that means the landscape looks very different than it did before the election.

So if you are a private or public employer, an insurance company, a work comp stakeholder, a clinician, a politician or state regulator, how different do you think your specific constituency is from the numbers listed above? My educated guess is that both surveys are fairly representative of the U.S. (the only other country that I’ve been following is Canada, which appears to be along the same trajectory in public opinion). Which means the numbers above are likely to guide coming public policy.

So what does this all mean for the workplace? Of paramount importance is to have a jurisdiction-specific (because all states are different) drug policy (pre-employment, post-accident, return-to-work) that explicitly addresses marijuana (because presence does not equal impairment, a characteristic unique to marijuana among intoxicants).

Keep your seat belts handy.

Mark Pew senior vice president of Prium, a medical managed care provider for the workers' compensation industry. This post first appeared in the Insurance Thought Leadership blog.