By Stephanie White
Earlier this year, the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) surprised everyone by announcing that it will no longer test for marijuana at random or pre-employment screening for firefighters. More recently, Prince William County (VA) followed suit by no longer testing for THC during county physicals.
I walked into this subject matter with what I can honestly say was an unbiased perspective. Having never used marijuana myself, I was also simultaneously aware of the fact that I have never run a marijuana overdose. In fact, over the span of 17 years I’ve run exactly one marijuana related call: a first time teenager who had never been told that he might find himself coughing. A lot.
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After the COVID fatigue and firefighter staffing crisis of 2020, I found myself in a new territory of not being able to “come off duty” mentally. I was staying in that fun state of hypervigilance where you hear CAD alerts out of nowhere and look like a wild-eyed addict every time you jump at imaginary tones going off. You know that place—all firefighters have been there.
Between that and a worsening spinal disc issue (which I like to describe as a stepped-on jelly donut), I decided that it was time to start researching better life options. The release of multiple reports and the show “Dopesick” strongly suggest that opioids have been specifically designed to get us hooked. I would wager that most of us have also seen at least one nurse, cop, or firefighter get injured and succumb to an opioid addiction as a result of being prescribed these medications. That’s a road I have no intention of going down.
Enter Pittsburgh, the city of horrible sports fans and Heinz ketchup. They also somehow managed to negotiate medical marijuana as part of their collective bargaining agreement. They’re currently the unicorn of the fire service (a black and gold unicorn, of course). I sat down with a few of the members of their department who represented IAFF Local 1 recently to have a chat and see if I could get a few questions answered.
My panel consisted of IAFF Local 1 Health and Safety Director John Gardell, Trustee Sean O’Leary, and Trustee John Farah.
O’Leary, who’s been tackling the stigma of the issue, talked about how important it is to destigmatize marijuana and present the science so it can be taken seriously as an option.
“I think the stigma of it and the first step of climbing the mountain of medical marijuana with your employer, your spouse, or your family if you want to use it is to have it recognized as medicine. It’s always been seen as a party drug and recreational. Medical marijuana has always been that wink and nod thing ‘Yeah, it’s a medicine.’ You have to get over that and take that step with your employer, with your family,” said O’Leary.
He did a thorough job of bringing up the medical ways it can help, from insomnia, to helping cancer patients find an appetite, to his grandmother suffering with debilitating pain in her feet.
“It’s run a spectrum and it has for 50-60-70 years quietly, but nobody wanted to talk about it, and now that we’re finally talking about medical marijuana and different aspects people have to recognize this as medicine,” O’Leary said. “that’s the first step, that this is actual medicine. Can it be used recreationally? Anything can. Anything can be misused, anything can be recreationally used, but as a medicine this has actual use.”
John Gardell says that one of the biggest questions they’re asked is: “How do you know your individuals aren’t using on duty, how do you know they’re not under the influence?
“To me the answer is really simple: we–and most departments–rely on the first or immediate supervisor to deal with impairment situations,” Gardell said. “Whether those are prescription medications that have been abused, whether it be medical marijuana, or in the case of alcohol abuse. If an individual comes into to work impaired, we rely on the immediate supervisor to identify that impairment and to take corrective action or action with the next step supervisor to fix or handle the situation. This is no different. Medical marijuana to us and how we have explained it is that we would look at that type of impairment just like we would prescription medication. I think all of us know (and if you’re unaware), many of our departments have individuals that have been prescribed drugs that don’t allow the operation of heavy machinery equipment, it could impair that type of situation. Sometimes it’s by our medical review officers to get through (or return to work) injuries -injuries that have happened on the job. Now you’re going to return with some sort of pain-killing medication, and each one of those can be abused.”
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Farah provided a perspective that many of our veterans might find familiar. “I was in the Marine Corp for four years, I did a tour in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obviously there’s some post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and things adopting back to society coming home that you deal with when you do something like that. I went to the V.A. for some help, And the first thing they wanna do to you is prescribe you some pharmaceuticals…Wellbutrin, Trazodone, Xanax, Klonopin, and many other prescription drugs. I tried everything I could; I didn’t like the way those drugs made me feel. I felt like I was a zombie, I wasn’t productive in life. At one point I was talking to a counselor and he said: ‘Have you ever tried marijuana?’ I said no. He said I can’t give you marijuana because it’s illegal federally and it’s a schedule 1 drug, so I can’t prescribe you marijuana. But I would like you use marijuana and come back to me and see how it feels – how it helps you.
Farah did so and found it helped. “It helps my sleep, it helps my anxiety, it helped numerous other side effects that come with PTSD.”
He went on to describe how Pennsylvania legalized medical marijuana in 2016. Farah went to his local president and explained the benefits he had received from it as a war vet. The board of his local put together a plan to work with the city to get it approved.
“We see traumatic events every shift every day, four to 10 times more than the average citizen sees in their lifetime was the last study I read. That’s a lot if you ask me. If we can give our members another tool to help them combat some of their issues then I say why not try it?”
Sean O’Leary and John Gardell went on to talk about the changes in testing that are being developed, along with DOT upping the amount of THC that is allowable in the blood stream.
“What’s the intoxication level with THC, we don’t know these things yet. It’s a growing field and the FDA is working on it, DOT is working on it, they want to have that answer too. The medical marijuana community and people that support it, we want it too. We want that test in place so we can protect ourselves” said O’Leary.
“I think when that gets produced that’s going to be the catalyst for a lot more departments to start being a little more open minded to it. I think if you open the conversation, you explain like we did to our various board members how regulated it actually is in all 37 states where it’s legal, they have to realize and you have to explain, maybe get over that stigma if you will (at least with supervisors), and say hey, look, this isn’t something that’s going to be a gateway. This isn’t something that works in that fashion, there’s actual uses for this. You have to broach that subject,” said Gardell.
Leaving the conversation that day, I didn’t feel the urge to run out and grab my medical marijuana card. I have to say, though, it did bring me a level of peace, knowing that I had options other than the ones we had been using with limited success to treat pain and PTSD.
Also, after my conversation with the guys on the wrong side of sports, I couldn’t help but notice how many times information about traumatic calls I had recently run popped up in varies social media apps and news feeds.
Farah pointed it out. We see more trauma in a day in the line of duty than the average public sees in a lifetime. And now? Well, now it’s found a way to follow us, making our risk of PTSD and burnout even higher.
As the conversation around behavioral health and PTSD grows, and as departments fight to recruit and retain, we have to wonder what the risk benefit of departments fighting for medical marijuana will be. If we’re so willing to throw a cocktail of medications or highly addictive opioids at our people to help ease the mental and physical injuries they’ve sustained on the job, are we willing to brave the stigma and give a solo medication a try?
Stephanie White is a 19-year veteran of the fire service, and has spent the past 17 years as a professional firefighter/paramedic in a metropolitan fire department. Throughout her career, she has been actively involved in firefighter health and safety as a personal trainer, cancer awareness educator, and a trained mental health peer.
