The road between the two is a conduit for sick patients and supplies, but also a frontier between federal and state jurisdictions.
“If there’s drug testing involved, then the federal law is the primary law that we follow,” said Peter Potter, the VA Medical Center’s spokesman.
“This law will not apply to federal employees, period,” said Scott DeLuca, a lawyer with Kavinoky Cook who has represented both public and private sector employers.
There are 113,900 federal workers in the state of New York, according to the state comptroller’s office, with nearly 7,000 in the Capital Region.
Albany Medical Center, the VA hospital’s neighbor, believes its federal contracts require a drug-free workplace and classrooms, similar to those of the colleges and universities that plan to still prohibit pot on campus.
Geoffrey Mort, a labor attorney with Kraus & Zuchlewski and a member of the state bar association’s Cannabis Law Committee, said it will be key to see how the law plays out in courts, unless the Legislature provides more explicit exceptions.
According to Joe Reilly, president of National Drug Screening Inc., which offers workplace testing, New York’s employers will need to rely more heavily on symptom assessment if they want to consider disciplinary action.
“But there’s nothing mass market throughout the United States that has … any type of certification or licensure that can prove impairment on marijuana.
“We’re going to have to take time to figure out how the law impacts different workers differently,” said Mark Kotzin, a spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association, the state’s largest labor union.
Florida, Connecticut and Texas are among the states that have seen legal proceedings in recent years after teachers were penalized for out-of-office cannabis use, both medical and recreational.
Adam Ross, an employment lawyer who has represented both teachers’ unions and school districts, said he expects the new rights to apply to school employees.
“Teachers can be disciplined for doing things that are lawful if they are done in a way that portrays them as a poor role model for students and representative of the school,” Ross said.
New York courts haven’t considered similar cases of teachers penalized for cannabis use.
Soon after, she got a medical marijuana prescription for treatment of her inflammatory bowel disease symptoms. The court found that her job status was protected under state Human Rights Law — even though she had used the drug before receiving her prescription — since her status as a medical marijuana patient constituted a disability.