The transportation industry is advising Congress that, if marijuana is federally rescheduled, businesses want assurances that they won’t have to forgo zero-tolerance drug policies for drivers—while stressing that a key problem for the sector is a lack of technology to detect impaired driving.
At a hearing before the House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways and Transit last week, representatives of the trucking and railway industries addressed the challenge of enforcing drug policies—particularly with respect to marijuana as more states enact legalization and standard testing methods are still unable to identify when a driver is actively impaired from THC.
The typical urine-based drug tests that workers are subject to can detect THC metabolites for weeks after a person uses cannabis. There’s an even longer window of detection for hair tests. And while blood tests can show more recent drug use, it’s a costlier option for businesses that still cannot accurately demonstrate impairment.
Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) asked Dennis Dellinger—CEO of Cargo Transporters, Inc. who testified on behalf of the American Trucking Associations (ATA)—whether there was “anything specifically that Congress can do, or advocate for, to detect that immediate level of impairment with the half-lives of marijuana remaining inside of systems.”
Dellinger replied that he thinks “there’s a misconception out there that, marijuana or cannabis being legal, that people can operate vehicles under the influence, and that is a problem.”
“We do not have a test that tells us if you are under the influence or not, so we have to rely on the current urine test or the hair test, which tests back [beyond active impairment],” he said. “And I guess the struggle we have in our industry is we can’t compromise the system we have until there is a workable solution for a test to know whether you are actually under the influence at the time.”
“I think, in our company, if we had an accident at any degree, and we had post-accident tests and we tested positive, we would struggle defending anything in that accident,” he said. “And the retribution we would get for that from the public, from the media, would be astonishing. So our position is that, right now, we have to accept the testing that we have.”
In written testimony submitted ahead of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials, Dellinger said “more must be done to improve highway safety for all motorists.”
“Today we are primarily focused on the impacts of marijuana legalization, the adoption of effective safety technologies, driver distraction on our roadways, and ensuring that our drivers are well-trained,” he said.
“Since the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse launched in 2020, more than 250,000 positive drug tests among commercial motor vehicle drivers have been recorded, highlighting a persistent and alarming trend in substance use that threatens the safety of our nation’s highways. Of these, marijuana remains the leading drug violation among drivers, accounting for roughly 60 percent of positive tests annually—a troubling statistic that underscores its widespread impact on highway safety.”
He added that the Biden administration-initiated proposal to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) is “raising serious concerns for highway safety.”
“Such a move would weaken zero-tolerance policies, compromise a robust federal drug testing program currently in place for safety-sensitive professions, significantly complicate enforcement, and potentially increase marijuana use among all drivers,” Dellinger said. “Given the absence of a validated standard for measuring marijuana impairment and the fact that it already accounts for most drug violations in the FMCSA Clearinghouse, rescheduling marijuana would jeopardize the safety of millions of road users.”
“This Subcommittee must ensure that effective and robust drug testing protocols remain intact, and that transportation safety is prioritized regardless of the legal status of marijuana at the federal level,” he said.
During the hearing, Dellinger also responded to a question from Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) on the efficacy and logistics of adding hair-based drug testing options.
The witness said his company incorporated such testing in 2017, but he pointed out that each test is nearly twice as expensive as a standard urine test—and simply disclosing the policy allowing for hair testing may be turning off potential employees.
“The unfortunate thing is that that driver—all he has to do is leave us when he fails the hair test and go down the street, take a urine test [and he’s] is working for someone else,” he said.
A piece of written testimony submitted for a separate hearing last week before the House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials by Iam Jefferies, CEO of the Association of American Railroads, also noted the push to federally reschedule cannabis.
“Congress should ensure that employers whose employees conduct safety-sensitive activities each day, like the railroads, maintain the ability to drug test employees for marijuana usage and treat positive tests as proof of unacceptable employee conduct,” he said.
Last year, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) warned that marijuana rescheduling could create a “blind spot” with respect to drug testing of federally regulated workers in safety-sensitive positions—despite assurances from then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that the cannabis rescheduling proposal “would not alter” the federal drug testing requirements.
At a House committee hearing, Buttigieg had referenced concerns from ATA “about the broad public health and safety consequences of reclassification on the national highway system and its users,” which the trucking association voiced in a letter to the secretary.
As more states legalize marijuana, a federal report published last year showed that the number of positive drug tests among commercial drivers fell in 2023 compared to the year before, dropping from 57,597 in 2022 to 54,464 in the prior year. At the same time, however, the number of drivers who refused to be screened at all also increased by 39 percent.
Another question found that 65.4 percent of motor carriers believed current marijuana testing procedures should be replaced with methods that measure active impairment.
At the time, the report from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) noted a 65,000-driver deficit in the country and said the fear of positives over marijuana metabolites—which can remain in a person’s blood far long after active impairment—may be keeping would-be drivers out of the industry.
The record-high number of refusals came as the transportation industry faces a nationwide shortage of drivers, which some trade groups have said has only been made worse by drug testing policies that risk flagging drivers even when they’re not impaired on the job.
Current federal law mandates that commercial drivers abstain from cannabis, subjecting them to various forms of drug screening, from pre-employment to randomized testing.
In June 2022, meanwhile, an ATRI survey of licensed U.S. truck drivers found that 72.4 percent supported “loosening” cannabis laws and testing policies. Another 66.5 percent said that marijuana should be federally legalized.
Cannabis reform advocates, meanwhile, have also called on federal officials to change what they call “discriminatory” drug testing practices around the trucking industry.
A top Wells Fargo analyst said in 2022 that there’s one main reason for rising costs and worker shortages in the transportation sector: federal marijuana criminalization and resulting drug testing mandates that persist even as more states enact legalization.
Then-Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) sent a letter to the head of DOT in 2022, emphasizing that the agency’s policies on drug testing truckers and other commercial drivers for marijuana are unnecessarily costing people their jobs and contributing to supply chain issues.
The 2022 ATRI report noted that research into the impact of cannabis use on driving and highway safety is currently mixed, complicating rulemaking to address the issue. A separate 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) similarly found that evidence about cannabis’s ability to impair driving is inconclusive.
Also in 2023, DOT finalized a rule permitting another alternative option to screening urine samples: saliva-based testing. Depending on frequency of use, THC is generally detectable in saliva anywhere from one to 24 hours after use, according to the agency.
In 2022, meanwhile, DOT proposed guidance warning commercial drivers who use CBD products that they are doing so “at their own risk.”
A newsletter from DOT’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) published that same year included two sections on cannabis issues: one that again reminded employees that they’re barred from using marijuana and another that similarly warned that CBD products remain unregulated and could contain THC levels that are detectable in a drug test.
Meanwhile the head of ATA told Congress in 2023 that the state–federal marijuana policy conflict is creating a “litigious environment” for the trucking industry, contributing to the challenge of the labor shortage.
To that point, last October the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of a trucker who sued a cannabis company after he was fired over a positive THC test that he says was caused by consuming a hemp-derived CBD product.
The transportation industry is advising Congress that, if marijuana is federally rescheduled, businesses want assurances that they won’t have to forgo zero-tolerance drug policies for drivers—while stressing that a key problem for the sector is a lack of technology to detect impaired driving. At a hearing before the House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways Read More
