The federal government just made the most significant shift in cannabis policy in more than 50 years. And for most employers, the practical answer to "what does this mean for our drug testing program?" is: less than you think, and more than you're prepared for.
Nick Hartman, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at the Drug Screening Compliance Institute, has spent his career building defensible drug testing programs for employers navigating exactly this kind of regulatory whiplash. He advises companies on the state-by-state patchwork of marijuana law, and he was paying close attention when the Trump Administration moved marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act on April 23, 2026. On Don't Get Played, he joined host Sarah O'Melia, Vice President of Learning and Employee Communications at Cisive, to translate the news into something HR and TA leaders can actually use.
The central argument Nick builds across this conversation is not reassuring, exactly, but it is clarifying. Rescheduling is not legalization. Most existing employer obligations did not evaporate overnight. But the employers who treat this as a non-event are the ones who will be caught flat-footed when something goes wrong. And in a legal environment this fragmented, something always eventually goes wrong.
The confusion circulating in HR circles right now is understandable. "Schedule III" sounds like a significant loosening. It isn't — at least not yet, and not for most employers.
What the executive order did was move cannabis from a category of substances considered illegal with no recognized medical use to a category that acknowledges medical application while still carrying addiction risk. For medical marijuana dispensaries, that shift has tax and research implications. For employers running workplace drug testing programs, Nick is direct: it's status quo for the most part.
The carve-out that matters is medical marijuana. It's not a new problem but a reminder of one that already existed. Nearly 40 states have medical marijuana laws, and many of those laws carry meaningful protections for employees who are authorized users. Some states limit what substances employers can screen for. Some prohibit adverse employment action based on off-duty use. Some restrict what discipline can be imposed following a positive result. Federal rescheduling didn't create those state-level protections, but it put a spotlight on them.
"You have to understand that at the state level, states have medical marijuana laws," Nick said. "And some of those states have big-time limitations and protections for employees that lawfully use medical cannabis, while some states have no protection."
The employers most exposed right now are those who assumed federal policy was the whole picture.
For DOT-regulated industries — trucking, airlines, rail, federal contractors — the noise around rescheduling created real anxiety, and Nick understands why. The Health and Human Services mandate that governs DOT drug testing programs historically limited testing to Schedule I and II substances. Moving marijuana to Schedule III technically created a gap.
But the federal regulators closed it quickly. DOT Drug and Alcohol Program Administrators have stated clearly that it's business as usual until they say otherwise. The June 29 hearing on broader rescheduling may bring more clarity on the adult-use side, but for anyone operating under a federal drug-free workplace program, the answer right now is: keep doing exactly what you were doing.
Nick was characteristically direct about the underlying logic. "I don't think anybody wants someone to be under the influence or have recently used marijuana if they're about to fly an airplane or drive a train or a school bus full of children." The safety-sensitive carve-out that everyone assumed existed will almost certainly be codified. It just hasn't been yet.
The risk for federally regulated employers isn't in acting on this news. It's in the confusion, creating enough internal uncertainty that managers start making inconsistent decisions in the field.
Here is where the compliance picture gets genuinely complicated, and where Nick's work is most instructive.
States like California and Washington have passed laws that now prohibit employers from taking adverse employment action based on a positive marijuana result — unless the employer can demonstrate the employee used Delta-9 THC, the primary psychoactive compound, recently enough to indicate current impairment. The problem: standard urine drug testing cannot identify Delta-9. It detects metabolites, which can remain in the body long after any impairment has passed.
"For 40 years, all we were doing was looking for the past use of an illicit substance," Nick said. "Not trying to prove if someone used right now while at work or they're high or under the influence right now."
That shift — from detecting past use to proving recent use — is the most consequential operational change employers face right now. Oral fluid testing can identify Delta-9. Urine testing cannot. In states where that distinction has legal weight, the methodology an employer uses is no longer just a procedural detail. It's a compliance decision.
Minnesota won't let employers terminate someone on a first positive test without offering treatment and a path back to work. Maine prohibits breath alcohol testing as a methodology. Virginia has a law protecting medical use of cannabidiol — a substance that doesn't even appear on standard drug panels. Nick calls these the "head scratcher laws," and there are more of them than most HR teams realize.
The state law maze existed before April 23. Rescheduling just turned the lights on.
Nick's framework for what a modern drug testing program requires is organized around one core principle: a national zero-tolerance policy is no longer viable for multi-state employers. The state-by-state variation is too significant, and the litigation exposure for employers who ignore it is real and growing.
What he recommends instead is a layered policy structure: a core company policy that reflects how the employer wants the program to run absent any legal constraints, paired with state-specific addenda that define the actual limitations in each jurisdiction where employees work. That includes what substances can be tested, what methodologies can be used, and what disciplinary action is legally defensible.
"That way it's super organized, it can be disseminated by state, and you're not sending your managers and supervisors a hundred-page document they have to read through and then interpret and then apply to their program."
He's equally blunt about the risk of trying to build or update this kind of program without expert help. Plugging a company name into a template policy or outsourcing the thinking to an AI platform, doesn't produce a defensible program. It produces a liability waiting to be triggered. The compliance landscape requires someone who is tracking state statutes, regulations, case law, and local ordinances simultaneously, and understanding how they interact with the specifics of a given employer's workforce.
The last piece Nick emphasizes is reasonable suspicion training for managers and supervisors. It is, in his framing, the best insurance policy an employer can buy. The legal exposure for a manager who recognizes signs of workplace impairment and does nothing is almost always greater than that of one who correctly follows a documented, reasonable-suspicion protocol. Most employers have the policy. Far fewer have made sure the people responsible for enforcing it know what to do.
Drug testing compliance has never been a set-it-and-forget-it function, and the federal rescheduling of marijuana is a useful, if jarring, reminder of that. The employers who will navigate this well are not the ones who waited for the law to settle. They're the ones who already knew their exposure, state by state, and had a program structured to hold up when someone tested the edges of it.