Do you have a medical marijuana card?” asked a woman from HireRight, the company the U-M uses for preemployment drug tests.

Anne—who asked that her last name not be used—was in the midst of moving to Ann Arbor from Texas for her new job as a nurse practitioner and manager at the U-M’s Rogel Cancer Center. The caller was following up on the drug test she’d taken—it’s required for new hires at Michigan Medicine.

U-M public affairs staffer Dana Elger emails that the university doesn’t comment on specific personnel matters. But she confirms that it doesn’t accept appeals of HireRight’s findings, because the test “is highly accurate and an industry standard.” | Photo: J. Adrian Wylie

“No,” Anne told the HireRight rep. “And then I thought, ‘Well, do I go get one?’” she remembers. “But then I thought, ‘This is insane. I don’t even smoke marijuana. So now I had to go get a card for something I don’t even use?’” Nor, she says, does she vape, or eat gummies, or use any sort of intoxicating marijuana product.

She was, however, taking a nightly dose of “Charlotte’s Web,” an over-the-counter CBD oil recommended by her physician for her insomnia. (Due to the stress of patient care and the disruptions of shift work, most nurses—55 percent in one recent survey—have trouble sleeping.)

CBD products contain very little THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. They can’t get you high and aren’t controlled substances. But according to a May New York Times essay by Kevin Boehnke, a U-M research assistant professor, they may contain a compound that can trigger a positive urine drug screen for marijuana.

That’s what happened to Anne. According to HireRight’s test results—which were credited to chief medical officer Todd Simo—she had tested positive for marijuana.

“Do you want to appeal?” the caller from HireRight asked. “It costs $200.”

Anne said yes.

“I was in disbelief,” she says. “This was a job I had spent four months applying for. I thought it was all a mistake.”

She called the person at the U-M who’d recruited her to say she wanted to appeal. After being bounced back and forth several times between HireRight and Michigan Medicine, she learned that while the company offers appeals, the university doesn’t.

U-M public affairs staffer Dana Elger emails that the university doesn’t comment on specific personnel matters. But she confirms that it doesn’t accept appeals of HireRight’s findings, because the test “is highly accurate and an industry standard.”

Michigan Medicine rescinded Anne’s employment offer. She was devastated.

HireRight appears to offer a way to correct such misunderstandings: Elger notes that “If the failed test is for a legally prescribed medication, it would be reviewed by the Medical Review Officer [at HireRight] to verify a valid prescription and that the levels meet the standard threshold for the prescription.”

But Charlotte’s Web is sold over the counter—it’s not a prescription medicine. Anne’s physician, however, confirms that she recommended it, writing that she “has experienced significant improvement with the use of an OTC Cannabidiol (CBD) product.”

Anne continued to work in Texas until she completed her move to Ann Arbor; now she is once again looking for a job. Though her physician advised her to continue using Charlotte’s Web, she quit the medication for fear of repeating her experience at the U-M.

Boehnke’s essay in the Times was titled “The Increasingly Absurd Illogic of Workplace Drug Tests.” He wrote that he had used legal medical cannabis to manage pain from his fibromyalgia for nearly a decade before being hired at Michigan in 2018 to “develop a research program on, of all things, cannabis’s therapeutic effects on chronic pain.”

When he was notified that he would have to take a drug test, he immediately stopped using cannabis, drank a lot of water, exercised frequently, and tested clean.

“And for what?” he asked. “All the test showed was that I had avoided cannabis and other drugs during the preceding weeks. I could have partied for the rest of the year, and no one would have been the wiser.”

Days after failing HireRight’s drug test, Anne took the initiative to take a more sensitive drug test by Labcorp which can detect both CBD and THC. It found fourteen times more CBD than THC—a ratio, its report noted, consistent with the amount in CBD products.

Drug testing is not mandated by the federal government. Even the military gave more than 3,400 new recruits who failed a drug test on their first day a grace period to try again, the Times reported in April. Drug testing is not only uneven among institutions, but within them: The U-M tests some but not all of the people it hires.

“Such uneven enforcement makes me suspect that some employers don’t actually care;” Boehnke wrote, “they are simply checking a box that doesn’t really need to be checked. Since there’s no genuine safety or legal reason to keep doing this,” he asked, “isn’t it time we let new hires urinate in peace?”

It’s unlikely that Simo at HireRight would agree—it would eliminate a sizable segment of the company’s business. But even he is concerned that customers may be misusing the company’s findings.

In an April blog post, he wrote: “Employers should consider updating their drug testing policies and drug-free workplace policies to account for the use of CBD in the workplace.”