NDASA Does Not Deserve The Courts Time
Where you stand is a function of where you sit.
Of all the parties lining up to fight cannabis rescheduling — the prohibitionist ideologues, the anti-drug crusaders, the state attorneys general with political points to score — one organization stands apart for the sheer audacity of its position: the National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association.
NDASA is a designated participant in the DEA’s ALJ hearing, presented its case on July 2, and is simultaneously a lead petitioner in the D.C. Circuit lawsuit seeking to freeze the medical rescheduling order entirely. Its legal argument, laid out in sworn declarations filed with the court, deserves to be read carefully — because it may be the most nakedly self-interested claim of “harm” ever presented in a federal drug policy proceeding.
The Argument, In Their Own Words
In the joint motion for stay filed June 9, NDASA Executive Director M. Jo McGuire submitted a declaration explaining precisely how rescheduling “irreparably harms” the drug testing industry. The harms, as described under penalty of perjury:
First, Medical Review Officer practices — the physicians who interpret drug test results — derive the majority of their revenue from marijuana-positive test results. McGuire’s declaration states that reviewing positive THC results “usually accounts for more than 50% of a medical review officer practice’s total revenue.” Because rescheduling will lead many employers to stop testing for marijuana, NDASA projects a 35-50% revenue decline for MRO practices over six to twelve months, with some smaller practices forced to consolidate or close.
Second, employers will have to spend money updating their drug testing policies — an estimated $500 to $3,000 per employer, totaling roughly $700,000 across NDASA’s 700 employer members.
Read that again. The trade association’s argument — presented to a federal appeals court as grounds for freezing the most significant drug policy reform in half a century — is that its members make most of their money from marijuana positives, and legalizing medicine threatens that revenue stream.
This isn’t an argument about public health. It isn’t an argument about safety. It’s an argument that a policy change is bad because it reduces the number of people who can be flagged, penalized, and processed through a testing apparatus that exists to detect the thing being reformed. The buggy whip manufacturer suing to block the automobile at least had the decency not to file a sworn declaration explaining that horses were its profit center.
The Business Model Problem
Here’s what makes NDASA’s position so remarkable: the harm they describe is real. MRO practices genuinely do depend on marijuana positives. Employers genuinely will drop cannabis from testing panels. The drug testing industry genuinely will shrink.
But that harm is an indictment of the business model, not the policy.
For decades, the drug screening industry has profited from a testing regime that is scientifically incapable of measuring what employers actually care about: impairment. Standard urine tests detect THC metabolites that persist for days or weeks after consumption — meaning a worker who legally used cannabis on Saturday night can fail a drug test on Thursday morning while being completely sober. The test doesn’t measure whether someone is high at work. It measures whether they’ve been near cannabis in the past month.
This has been known for decades. And for decades, the industry had every incentive not to fix it — because the metabolite test’s overbreadth was the revenue engine. Every false-positive-for-impairment was a billable MRO review. Every legal medical patient in a state program who tested positive was a file to process. The system’s scientific inadequacy wasn’t a bug. It was the product.
Meanwhile, 40 states legalized medical cannabis. 24 states legalized adult use. More than six million registered patients entered state programs. And the drug testing industry — which McGuire’s own declaration acknowledges cannot currently verify whether a positive THC result reflects state-authorized medical use, because it never built the infrastructure to do so — kept running the same tests, collecting the same fees, and flagging the same legal patients.
The technology to do better exists. Oral fluid testing can narrow detection windows to hours rather than weeks, providing a far better proxy for recent use. Impairment-detection science has advanced meaningfully. Some forward-looking firms have adapted. But the industry’s trade association didn’t spend the last decade leading that transition. It spent the last six months suing to preserve the status quo.
The Legal Irony
The deeper irony is embedded in NDASA’s own court filing. The declaration complains that verifying medical marijuana use is “very difficult and time consuming” because state programs don’t dispense cannabis through standardized prescriptions, don’t provide prescriber contact information in a format MROs can use, and don’t maintain publicly accessible purchase records.
All true. And all of it describes exactly the problem that Schedule III normalization is designed to solve. DEA registration, federal recordkeeping requirements, practitioner documentation standards — the rescheduling framework NDASA is suing to block would, over time, create precisely the verification infrastructure NDASA claims it lacks. The organization is fighting the reform that would fix the problem it’s citing as a harm.
And the $700,000 in policy revision costs? Spread across 700 employer members, that’s roughly $1,000 per company — the cost of a routine compliance update of the kind employers absorb every time any employment law changes. Presenting that figure to the D.C. Circuit as “irreparable harm” justifying an emergency stay of federal drug policy requires either remarkable confidence or a remarkable absence of self-awareness.
What Reform Should Have Looked Like
None of this means workplace safety doesn’t matter. Safety-sensitive industries — transportation, aviation, heavy machinery — have legitimate needs, and the Department of Transportation has appropriately maintained its own testing standards through rescheduling. Nobody serious argues pilots should fly impaired.
But a testing industry that had adapted honestly to the last fifteen years of cannabis reform would look completely different today. It would have led the shift toward impairment-based and recent-use testing. It would have built medical-use verification systems as state programs scaled. It would have positioned MROs as the trusted interpreters of a more complicated legal landscape — a value-added role that rescheduling would have made more necessary, not less.
Instead, the industry’s trade association is in federal court arguing that the government must keep medicine in the same legal category as heroin because its members’ revenue depends on it — while participating in an ALJ hearing as an “aggrieved party” whose grievance is, functionally, that fewer Americans will be penalized for legal conduct.
The Bottom Line
There are serious arguments in the rescheduling debate. Questions about youth access, product potency, and pregnancy warnings deserve genuine engagement, and some of the hearing’s testimony addresses them.
NDASA’s argument is not one of them. It is a revenue-preservation claim dressed in the language of public safety, filed by an industry that had fifteen years to modernize and chose instead to litigate. The drug testing sector’s future belongs to firms that measure what matters — impairment, recency, fitness for duty — not to those whose business plan requires the federal government to pretend that six million medical patients are criminals.
The dumpster fire, to borrow Dr. Burchman’s phrase, isn’t cannabis withdrawal. It’s a business model that only works if the law never changes — and the law just changed.
This is Third-Party content and does not reflect (or not not reflect) the views of Cannabis Confidential or CB1 Capital.
Anthony Varrell is co-founder of Trade To Black and a thought leader in cannabis capital markets, government relations, and industry insights. Investing in public & private cannabis since 2014 via Stonebridge Partners.