DENVER, COLORADO –Earlier this week in Colorado — where marijuana is legal for recreational use in adults aged 21 and older — the state’s Supreme Court stunned supporters of common sense vice law reform when it ruled that an employer can legally fire someone for using marijuana. The shocking news is that the court wasn’t referring to on the job usage of cannabis, but rather times when the employee is off the clock. In other words, in Colorado, you can legally possess and smoke pot, but if your employer doesn’t like marijuana, or is offended that you’ve broken a federal law and fires you, you are out of luck.
Opponents of this decision say it makes absolutely no sense. “So basically what the Supreme Court did,” John Winston of Smart Drug Laws Now — a non-profit organization with a goal of promoting vice laws that keep adults out of jail for being adults — said, “was make it so that if your employer is stuck in 1930’s era understandings of marijuana, you can lose your livelihood for it.” Winston said he and other groups in the state would “absolutely” be appealing the decision “all the way up to the Supreme Court.”
In a stunning development, the Colorado Supreme Court has revisited their decision just one day later, but not to reverse it, but rather to clarify and strengthen the power that employers have in the state. According to a brief sent to The Political Garbage Chute from a source within the Colorado Supreme Court, the justices have decided to “tack on” some language that allows for employers to fire their employees if they go out of a post-work beer with one another.
“We understand that beer, like marijuana, is totally legal for adults of a certain, agreed-upon age to partake in. And we know that traditionally if a substance wasn’t illegal to use in the first place, that no employer would have a right to say anything about an employee using that substance in his or her off-hours,” the opinion reads. “However, as our decision the other day clearly shows, we are kinda willing to throw that whole idea of personal liberty out the window to make an insanely archaic point about drug use.”
When asked what he thought of the court’s recent decisions on pot and beer, Gary Garrison of Ft. Cloudrain, Colorado said he is “pissed as hell” that “some stuffy old bastards in a room somewhere can undo decades of actual progress that culminated in actual common sense coming out of vice regulation because they are stuck in propaganda from the 1980’s.” Garrison says he would “rather live in a state where adults can be adults, even with the shared risk involved of presuming that adults can be adults” than in a state where “the government gets to tell you what you can or can’t put in your body.”
“Pot has killed exactly zero people from overdose,” Garrison told The Political Garbage Chute. “And beer is as American as anything. Sure, it can definitely cause all kinds of problems if abused, but so can capitalism, and I don’t see the Supreme Court telling people they can’t take out small business loans if their employer doesn’t want them to.” Garrison said he will gladly sign any petition calling for the impeachment of any of the justices who supported what he is calling “a transparent swipe at social progress.”
Sources close to the court say the justices may yet still not be finished amending their original decision. “We are hearing rumbles between the justices about perhaps giving employers the right to fire employees if they fart after hours. Air pollution is a very real problem, according to these justices,” one source told us. “It totally jibes with their understanding of what liberty, justice and the American ideas of freedom are. The freedom to do whatever you want, as long as your boss is okay with it. The liberty to do with your body what you feel like, as long as your employer is okay with it, and the justice that comes with all employees being equally treated like shit, are all core beliefs of the conservative justices on the court.”
Support for marijuana legalization has reached all-time highs in most recent polling.
