Reasonable Suspicion, Cannabis, and the Room That Wouldn't Stop Talking

After the presentation, the real dialogue happened.

I walked off the stage at ASSP Safety '26 in Anaheim last week with about 15 minutes to spare. What I didn't expect was that half the room would stay for questions, and that four attendees would still be standing there talking long after everyone else had cleared out.

That told me something.

The Conference Itself

Let me start by saying that ASSP Safety '26 was the most well-run conference I have attended relative to its size. Nearly 2,000 attendees. Over 700 vendors. A session catalog that covered everything from cutting-edge AI applications in workplace safety to, and I say this with complete affection, the most talked about session of the entire conference, which focused on mitigating dog bites in the workplace. Safety professionals are a wonderfully practical group of people.

AI was everywhere, as expected. The industry is clearly wrestling with how to integrate it thoughtfully rather than just adopt it for adoption's sake. That conversation is worth watching.

But the session that stayed with me most was my own, not because of anything I said, but because of what the room told me in return.

What 75 Safety Professionals Confirmed

Session 7036 had roughly 75 attendees, and the engagement level was something I genuinely appreciated. These were not passive listeners. They were safety professionals wrestling with real situations in their organizations, and the questions they asked reflected that.

The theme that emerged most consistently was not surprising to me, but it was validating. The tension between federal law, state law, and where applicable, collective bargaining agreements, is creating genuine paralysis for safety managers trying to do the right thing. Nobody disputes that impairment in a safety-sensitive environment is unacceptable. What people are nervous about is taking action when the legal landscape around them feels uncertain and contradictory.

Unions add another layer of complexity that deserves its own conversation. When a collective bargaining agreement, state cannabis protections, and federal obligations are all pointing in different directions, the supervisor standing on the floor trying to make a real-time call is caught in the middle of forces their training never prepared them for.

And yet the reasonable suspicion process cuts through all of it. It does not depend on what state you are in. It does not depend on what the union contract says about off-duty use protections. What a trained supervisor directly observed, documented in real time, in objective and specific language, that is the evidence that holds up regardless of the legal framework around it.

That was not just my argument going into Anaheim. It was what the room confirmed coming out of it.

The Conversation That Stayed After

When the formal Q&A wrapped up, four attendees stayed. Two conversations stood out.

The first was a shared acknowledgment among all of us that the weight of supervisor observation has fundamentally shifted. In a legal and regulatory environment where a positive test result carries less standalone evidentiary weight than it once did, what the trained supervisor saw, documented, and acted on has become the record that matters most. That is not a theoretical argument anymore. It is what safety managers across the country are experiencing in practice.

The second was a direct conversation about reasonable suspicion training and specifically, the gap between organizations that have checked the training box and organizations that have actually prepared their supervisors for the moment. Awareness training and readiness training are not the same thing. The room understood that distinction clearly. The question was how to close it.

That question is one I have been building toward answering for months. It is the work I do with organizations every day.

What Comes Next

ASSP Safety '26 was a chapter, not the whole story. The conversations that started in that room in Anaheim are the same ones happening in facilities across the country right now. Safety managers who know something is wrong but are nervous to act. Supervisors who were trained once and never practiced. Organizations whose policies were written before the legal landscape looked anything like it does today.

If your organization is navigating any of this, whether that is updating your reasonable suspicion policy, training your supervisors in a way that actually changes behavior, or figuring out how to act with confidence when the legal environment feels uncertain, reach out. On-site reasonable suspicion training built specifically for safety-sensitive environments is exactly what we do.

The conference is over. The conversation is not.