In years past, a Chicago police officer who tested positive for cannabis would face firing from the department, but no more.
Earlier this month, the Chicago Police Board voted unanimously to suspend a veteran officer for three months for failing a drug screen in August 2021. The officer claimed to have unknowingly ingested cannabis while at a barbecue in Michigan.
The case of Officer Marshall Andrews, who joined CPD in 2010, marks the first time the department and Police Board have taken disciplinary action against an officer who tested positive for a substance that is no longer illegal in Illinois.
Despite the shift in state law — recreational cannabis use was made legal as of early 2020 — CPD officers are forbidden from partaking, and they remain subject to random drug screens at department headquarters.
But still, the board found, times have changed. Such a violation would have almost certainly meant firing proceedings in prior years.
“Officers who use cannabis are no longer violating a law they swore to uphold,” the board wrote in its decision last week. “In addition, because of legalization there is less risk that officers who use cannabis will become involved with a person or enterprise engaged in the illegal sale, delivery, or manufacture of drugs.”
Andrews testified during his evidentiary hearing that the positive test “must have been the result of eating food at a barbecue, a few days prior to submitting to the drug test, that unknown to him was laced with cannabis.”
The board didn’t buy it, saying “there was no evidence to support” that claim.
“The Board finds no evidence that Respondent is a drug user, no evidence that there was any adverse impact in the performance of his duties, nor evidence of any other negative consequences from his ingestion of cannabis,” board members added.
A representative for the Fraternal Order of Police, the union that represents rank-and-file CPD officers, didn’t respond to a request for comment.