Under Illinois workers’ compensation law, if you are injured on the job (or really any other time for most employees) your employer can drug test you. If you fail that drug test, it creates a “rebuttable presumption” that you were intoxicated when you got hurt. The fancy legal phrase rebuttable presumption means that you still have a right to prove you weren’t intoxicated. In other words, just because you smoked pot on Saturday and it’s in your system, that has nothing to do with you getting hurt three days later at work.

When you do fail a drug test, the insurance company will deny your case because they have been given legal cover to do so. So you have to hire an attorney who will present evidence, which is usually your testimony, that you weren’t high when you got hurt. They typically have no way to refute that and you usually win your case.

There are some injuries where we can usually get a positive result much quicker. That’s when it comes to repetitive trauma injuries. A repetitive trauma is an injury that occurs from doing the same or similar activities over and over. Across a period of time, your body starts to break down. Eventually the pain becomes too much and you seek medical treatment. Common examples are typing causing carpal tunnel syndrome or lifting causing injuries to your back or shoulders. We also see a lot of foot injuries from walking on uneven ground and/or in steel toed boots.

Whatever the injury, the reality is that it’s happening over a period of time. So unless you were permanently high over that time, it would be incredibly difficult for an insurance company to show that a failed drug test had anything to do with your injury.

In fact, a common response as to why people test positive for marijuana, aside from it being legal, is that they used it to manage their pain from the work injury.

But no matter why you tested positive, it’s absurd to claim it impacted a repetitive trauma injury in a way that should result in your claim getting denied or delayed in any manner. So we push back very hard on these denials and in some cases you could file for penalties and fees over the unreasonable delay of benefits.

The bottom line is don’t panic if this happens to you. Under Illinois law this is a solvable problem and one that we’d be happy to help fix. Call us any time at 312-346-5578 to talk with an experienced attorney for free.