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In December 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing the Department of Justice to complete the rulemaking process to move marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act. While the Executive Order is aimed at legalizing marijuana research and does not change the current law, it may significantly impact how employers address medical marijuana in the workplace under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Accordingly, employers should understand that existing legal obligations and workplace policies are not yet affected.
Over the last ten years, with a majority of states legalizing the use of medical marijuana to treat debilitating conditions, employers throughout the country have been forced to answer whether they have to accommodate an employer's lawful use of medical marijuana during non-working hours. The answer to this question has been contingent on the state where the employee works because some states require employers to accommodate off-site, off-duty use for non-safety-sensitive employers. In this analysis, there has been one constant for employers: federal law does not require accommodation.
Under the ADA, employees who are "currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs" are not protected. That means that an employer can take an adverse action such as disciplining or terminating an employee for using a Schedule I substance, and the employee cannot do anything about it. Other than marijuana, Schedule I substances include drugs such as heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and peyote — substances that, under federal law, are deemed to have no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. As part of this classification, courts have consistently held that employers are not required to accommodate medical marijuana use under the ADA, and claims for failure to accommodate on this basis have routinely been dismissed.
By contrast, the ADA does protect employees who lawfully use other controlled substances, including drugs classified under Schedules II, III, IV, and V, when those medications are prescribed and used appropriately. In such circumstances, an employer generally may not take adverse action solely because of the employee's medication use and must consider reasonable accommodations, unless the employee is impaired at work, the use poses a direct threat to safety, or the requested accommodation would be unreasonable.
Marijuana's current classification as a Schedule I drug is therefore critical to the existing legal framework. If marijuana is ultimately reclassified as a Schedule III substance, it would no longer fall within the ADA's exclusion for illegal drug use. This change could invite litigation arguing that off-duty medical marijuana use should be evaluated under the same reasonable accommodation standards that apply to other prescription medications.
Until the rulemaking process is completed and marijuana is formally rescheduled, federal law remains unchanged. But if and when that change comes, employers will be forced to assess their interactive process for accommodations in every state and likely make changes to job descriptions to identify which employees are safety sensitive such that an accommodation cannot occur. Whether medical marijuana ultimately comes to be treated like other prescription medications under federal disability law remains an open question, and one that employers should continue to watch closely as the regulatory and litigation landscape develops.
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