As our nation continues to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, many in the United States are eyeing an economic recovery the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
This is due to a number of factors, including the rapid reopening of many crowd-dependent industries, the creation of jobs in those industries, and a population of Americans who have largely saved many over the last 14 months on account of how seldom they had the opportunity to spend it on restaurants, plane tickets, and concerts.
But now the federal government is eyeing a way to supercharge this recovery: The federal legalization of marijuana.
Amazon, one of the world’s most powerful companies and largest employers, is now taking a stance on that issue, and many people are shocked.
In a blog post Tuesday Amazon’s consumer boss, Dave Clark, said the company supports the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, reintroduced in the House late last month. The MORE Act would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level, expunge criminal records and invest in impacted communities.
“We hope that other employers will join us and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law,” Clark wrote.
And that’s not all.
Amazon said it would adjust its corporate drug testing policy for some of its workers. The company will no longer include marijuana in its drug screening program for any positions not regulated by the Department of Transportation, Clark said.
“In the past, like many employers, we’ve disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use,” Clark said. “However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we’ve changed course.”
Well over half of the states in this nation have some form of legal weed, whether it be recreational, medicinal, or simply “decriminalized”, and those locales have almost exclusively reported positive results from the decision.
