Maryland’s fire and rescue cannabis law took effect October 1, 2026, and it changes more than employment policy for the counties, municipalities, and fire control districts that self-insure their workers’ compensation. Senate Bill 439, cross-filed as House Bill 797 and enacted as Chapter 183 of the Acts of 2026, was signed by the Governor on April 28 after passing the Senate 33-11 and the House 108-23. It prohibits employers from disciplining, discharging, or otherwise discriminating against a covered fire and rescue employee on the basis of a valid medical cannabis certification or a positive cannabis test while the employee holds one.
The statute does not amend the workers’ compensation act. What it does is strip out a piece of leverage that self-insured public entities have used in first-responder injury disputes: the ability to treat a positive THC test as the opening move in a compensability fight.
What the law actually covers
Covered employees are firefighters, emergency medical technicians, cardiac rescue technicians, and paramedics employed by a municipal corporation, a county, the State, the State Airport Authority, or a fire control district, according to the Department of Legislative Services Fiscal and Policy Note. Private fire and EMS contractors sit outside the enumerated employer list and should read the definitions with counsel before assuming they are exempt.
Two employer authorities survive. An employer may still prohibit cannabis use while on duty and may still remove an impaired worker from duty. And if a covered employee reports for work impaired by cannabis, the employer is required to report the incident to the State Emergency Medical Services Board. That reporting obligation is a new data stream, and it cuts in an unexpected direction: the law may produce more documented impairment incidents, not fewer, because documentation is now mandatory rather than discretionary.
The word doing the legal work is “solely.” Adverse action based on observed impairment, documented safety violations, or a pattern of conduct that includes a positive test remains available. Adverse action based only on the test result, for a certified patient, is now off the table.
Who it affects
The direct audience is Maryland public entities that self-insure workers’ compensation for paid fire and EMS personnel: counties, municipalities, the State itself, the Airport Authority, and fire control districts. The Department of Legislative Services flagged that State expenditures may increase both through the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights, which gets $67,800 in general funds in fiscal 2027 to handle the new complaint volume, and through the State’s own role as a covered employer.
The indirect audience is broader. Any self-insured public entity in a state with heavy first-responder presumption statutes should read this as a template, not an anomaly.
The causation defense, before and after
Maryland workers’ compensation is no-fault with a carve-out: an employer can deny or reduce benefits if it can show intoxication or drug impairment was the primary cause of the injury. As Maryland employment counsel have noted, the Workers’ Compensation Commission requires evidence that the intoxication directly caused the injury at issue; a positive test alone does not disqualify a claimant. A worker struck by falling equipment who tests positive may still collect if the impairment played no role in the incident.
In practice, though, the positive test did work. It anchored a denial posture, shaped settlement leverage, and supported apportionment arguments in close calls. For a certified medical cannabis patient, that anchor is gone as of October 1. The employer’s proof problem now runs through observed impairment at the time of the accident and a causal link to the injury mechanism, which is a materially harder case to build, particularly when THC metabolites are detectable in urine for days or weeks after any psychoactive effect has resolved.
Where this shows up in your reserves
The exposure is case reserve adequacy on open first-responder claims, not IBNR from new frequency. If your adjusters or TPA have been carrying any open fire and EMS claims at a discounted reserve, on the theory that an intoxication defense would reduce or defeat compensability, those files need to be revalued toward full indemnity and medical value. The discount was a judgment call anchored in a defense that Chapter 183 just narrowed for certified patients.
Three specific places to look:
- Case reserves on open first-responder claims with a documented positive cannabis test. Pull the file notes. If the reserve rationale references the test, the policy violation, or a contemplated intoxication defense, ask whether the claimant holds a medical cannabis certification and whether the reserve still stands without that defense.
- Denial and dispute frequency in the development triangle. A drop in denials on first-responder claims after October 1 will surface first as higher paid and reported losses on recent accident months, which can distort age-to-age factors if your actuary reads the shift as severity rather than a change in defense posture. We covered how recreational cannabis has already moved claim frequency in WCRI’s multi-state marijuana findings; this is the mirror image, a defense-side removal rather than a frequency add.
- ALAE and litigation mix. Claims that would have settled early under denial pressure now run longer, and some disputes migrate out of workers’ compensation entirely. A terminated certified patient now has a statutory discrimination claim at the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights, with a 300-day filing window for non-harassment claims and compensatory damage caps that scale with employer size: $50,000 for respondents with 15 to 100 employees, rising to $300,000 for 501 or more. For a county that is also the WC self-insurer, the same incident can generate both a full-value comp claim and an employment claim.
This lands on top of the October 1 effective date of Maryland’s firefighter hypertension presumption, which we covered in the SB 90 reserve gap analysis. Maryland public-entity self-insurers absorbed a frequency expansion and a defense contraction in the same quarter.
The multi-state pattern
Maryland is a data point, not an outlier. As employment-law analysts have tracked, New Jersey’s Sanders v. Levari decision in 2026 held a positive THC result alone insufficient to support termination in many circumstances; California’s AB 2188 protects off-duty cannabis use outside safety-sensitive roles; Minnesota’s legalization statute includes off-duty use protections. The organizing principle across all of them is the same one Maryland codified for a specific employee class: a positive test is increasingly separable from what an employer may do with it.
The watch item is the 2027 sessions in states with dense first-responder presumption statutes, where a firefighter-specific cannabis bill would follow the same political logic that carried Maryland’s. If two or three more states move, the intoxication defense stops being a reliable reserving assumption for public-entity WC programs generally, and belongs in the same category as other statutory defense erosion. The diagnostic habits are the same ones we describe in case reserve strengthening: the question is whether individual file reserves reflect the law as it stands today, not the law as it stood when the file was set.
What this means for your next review
Put two items on the agenda for your next interim reserve review or monitoring meeting. First, a claim-level inventory of open fire and EMS files where a cannabis test appears anywhere in the record, with the reserve rationale restated under the post-October 1 defense landscape. Second, a denial-rate read on first-responder claims reported since October 1, so your actuary can distinguish a defense-posture change from genuine severity development before it contaminates the factors. If your program funds through a pool or captive, confirm the actuarial report’s assumptions explicitly address the narrowed defense rather than carrying historical denial behavior forward.
Decision-maker checklist
- Ask your TPA or claims administrator how many open first-responder files reference a positive cannabis test, and whether any reserve reflects a contemplated intoxication defense.
- Confirm your post-accident testing protocol distinguishes impairment evidence (observed behavior, blood or oral fluid) from mere presence, since only the former now carries the defense.
- Verify the new mandatory reporting path to the State Emergency Medical Services Board is built into your incident workflow, and decide who owns that data internally.
- Ask counsel whether your drug testing policy, as written, would survive a “solely” challenge for a certified patient.
- If you operate in multiple states, map which jurisdictions already limit adverse action on positive cannabis tests before applying one national testing policy.
- Ask your actuary whether the expected denial-to-litigation mix on first-responder claims needs restating, including the employment-practices exposure that now sits alongside the comp claim.
Sources
- Maryland General Assembly, SB 439 bill page and history (Chapter 183, Acts of 2026)
- Maryland Department of Legislative Services, Fiscal and Policy Note, HB 797 (Third Reader)
- Chapter 183 (SB 439) enacted bill text, Maryland Acts of 2026
- DrugScreens.com, Can Employers Still Test Firefighters for Marijuana? Maryland’s New 2026 THC Law Explained (October 1, 2026)
- Cohen, Snyder & Eisenberg, P.A., Drug use can complicate workers’ compensation claims (October 23, 2025)