What rescheduling weed could mean for the workplace

Cannabis advocates’ efforts to ease regulations surrounding the drug reached a new high last month when the Trump administration announced it would reschedule medical marijuana under a less strict category.

State medical marijuana products will be moved from Schedule I, the most regulated category, for drugs like heroin with no medical use and high potential for abuse, to Schedule III, for drugs with low potential for abuse like Tylenol with codeine and testosterone, according to an April 23 order from the Department of Justice. The order also moves FDA-approved products that contain marijuana to the less-regulated category, though only a few such products have been greenlit by the agency.

Though the decision to reschedule medical marijuana isn’t expected to have a major impact on employers for now, it could pave the way for more employees to request accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, legal experts told HR Brew.

Accommodating for change. Since California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana 30 years ago, most of the country has followed suit. As of Feb. 2026, medical marijuana use was legal in roughly 40 states and Washington, DC. About half of these states have legalized recreational marijuana.

The DOJ’s recent order doesn’t touch recreational weed, and some employers can—and do—bar the use of such substances in their workplaces, Brett Gelbord, a partner with the law firm Dykema, based in Detroit, said. In recent years, he said he’s observed employers start to include cannabis in their handbooks’ substance use policies, alongside things like alcohol, prescription drugs, and certain illegal substances.

But employers may have to be more careful about medical marijuana, particularly now that it’s being rescheduled, sources told us. That’s because the change may prompt workers to request accommodations for medical marijuana use under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Nearly 22% of adults who self-identified as living with disability reported using cannabis from 2023–2024, according to the National Survey on Health and Disability, published last month by the Disability and Health Journal.

“If you have an employee, who has a card or is a registered patient…and they come to you with some sort of request for an accommodation, I think that it would be important for the employer to consider that a little more closely than they may have previously,” Gelbord said. If an employee can show that off-duty marijuana use helps them manage a disability under the ADA, for example, “firing them for failing a drug test might be a problem for you as an employer,” he added.

“You’ve got the federal ADA and then you have a lot of states which have their own state disability discrimination laws…there have been plenty of courts and plenty of states that have created employment-related protections for not only medical marijuana card holders, but really all types of marijuana users from a state level,” Tae Phillips, a shareholder with Ogletree Deakins who co-chairs the law firm’s drug testing practice group, said. About half the states where medical marijuana is legal also ban employers from refusing employment or otherwise discriminating against patients who use it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Now that medical marijuana is being moved from Schedule I to Schedule III, “there is a possibility that there could be an expansion of these disability claims to go beyond your state disability laws and start to become more prevalent in ADA claims,” Phillips said.

This impact could be particularly important for employers in states that don’t have an anti-discrimination law regarding medical marijuana use, he said. “The ADA might now be a potential avenue that folks can pursue for legal employment claims.”

What about drug testing? Some companies have pulled back on or stopped drug testing their employees in recent years. The organizations that still test, though, are increasingly likely to find marijuana in their workers’ systems. Among US workers who took urine drug tests for their jobs in 2024, 4.5% tested positive for marijuana, up from 3.6% in 2020, according to Quest Diagnostics, a laboratory diagnostics company.

When workers test positive for marijuana, Phillips typically counsels employers to go through a “very strategic disability accommodation process” before taking any adverse employment actions, such as firing them or docking their pay.

Engaging in this process will be “even more important” now that medical marijuana use could be a potential accommodation under the ADA, he said.

As with all things compliance, the ground could shift quickly here. A hearing scheduled for June 29 will consider not only the proposal to move medical marijuana, but also all cannabis, from Schedule I to Schedule III.