Employee assistance program. Read that phrase as an operator and it sounds like a benefit you add when the budget allows: a number on a poster, three sessions nobody uses.
Read it as the Commission wrote it and it is the only workplace document in the rulebook you are not permitted to skip.
Every New Jersey cannabis workplace policy question starts at N.J.A.C. 17:30-9.9. Nine lines. It names three written policies, makes every one of them voluntary, then turns around and requires a contract. That asymmetry has sat there since 2021, and until this spring it cost nobody anything.
Here is your workplace file, ordered by how much of it is your decision, starting with the part that is not.
The contract you do not get a vote on
Subsection (c) is one sentence: the license holder has to maintain a contract with an approved New Jersey employee assistance program. Adopted at 53 N.J.R. 1583(a) effective August 19, 2021, amended at 55 N.J.R. 402(a) effective March 6, 2023, and no microbusiness carve-out in either version, which matters, because 17:30-6.7(c)(2) expressly excuses microbusinesses from the labor-organization attestation. The smallest licensee in New Jersey is off the hook for a union attestation and on the hook for an EAP.
The rule never says what belongs in the contract, what it costs, or whether one employee ever calls the number.
Not your call: holding a contract with an approved New Jersey program. Your call: every term inside it.
Five things are already the case in your workplace today, with nothing at all on the shelf:
- The EAP contract is still required. 17:30-9.9(c) is not conditioned on anything, including whether you have written a single policy.
- Anything you did write is producible. Under 17:30-9.9(b) you hand your policies to the Commission on request, so a half-finished draft on a shared drive is a document, not a draft.
- A positive test on its own still decides nothing. Under N.J.S.A. 24:6I-52a(1), cannabinoid metabolites alone cannot support an adverse employment action.
- A qualifying patient keeps their protections. 17:30-9.9(a)3 says a cannabis-at-work policy may not infringe rights under P.L.2019, c.153, and that is just as true of the policy you never wrote.
- Federal obligations still override. Under N.J.S.A. 24:6I-52b(1)(b), an employer facing a provable adverse impact on a federal contract may conform its prohibitions to federal law.
The evaluation nobody in New Jersey is certified to perform
To act on a positive test you need a physical evaluation by somebody certified to opine on an employee's state of impairment. N.J.S.A. 24:6I-52a(2)(a) directs the Commission to set the standards for that certification.
On September 9, 2022, then-Executive Director Jeff Brown issued interim guidance: designate an interim staff member, possibly a third-party contractor, and do that until the Commission formulates and approves standards for WIRE certifications. P.L.2025, c.325, effective January 13, 2026, renamed the role from Workplace Impairment Recognition Expert to Evaluator and handed the certification work to the Department of Labor. Four years and six weeks on, the interim designee is still the only route there is.
Not your call: that an adverse action needs more than a lab result. Your call: who in your building says so.
Your New Jersey cannabis workplace policy is optional and so are the other two
Subsection (a) lists them. A smoke-free workplace policy. A policy barring illicit controlled dangerous substances and alcohol at work. A policy barring cannabis use or impairment while working, which may not infringe a qualifying patient's rights. May adopt any of the following three.
Then subsection (b), which is quietly clever: whatever you wrote, you make available to the Commission on request. No credit for writing all three, no penalty for writing none, only a guarantee that the Commission gets to read your choice. The badging rules alongside it, which I walked through in the post on the employee identification card, are the opposite: prescriptive to the comma.
Not your call: producing on request whatever exists. Your call: whether anything exists to produce.
The form the state wrote for you and never asked you to use
The 2022 guidance recommends a uniform Reasonable Suspicion Observation Report documenting behavior, physical signs and the evidence behind the suspicion, and ships a downloadable template that is not cannabis-specific. It is specific about who fills it in: the employee's manager or supervisor, plus either your designated interim staff member or a second manager. Two people, every time. A cognitive impairment test or an ocular scan may serve as evidence.
Nothing requires any of it. The guidance states on its face that it creates no new requirements or rights.
Not your call: nothing. Your call: all of it.
The procedure that decides what the other four are worth
The guidance says employers should establish a standard operating procedure for the reasonable-suspicion process. Should. Nothing in 17:30 makes you, and it is the one document of the five that turns the rest from paper into practice, because an ocular scan is only evidence if somebody knew to run one at two o'clock on a Tuesday. You are already buying the time: 17:30-9.8 requires eight hours of training a year, and the published violation categories show what the Commission notices when those hours are spent badly.
Not your call: eight hours of training every calendar year. Your call: whether any of them go anywhere near this.
What changed on May 26
On May 26, 2026 the Appellate Division decided Sanders v. The Levari Group, LLC, a company doing business as First Choice Freezer and not a cannabis business at all. A customer service applicant's offer was rescinded after a pre-employment test found metabolites. She was offered a retest at her own expense, could not afford it, and sued. The trial court dismissed the claim in April 2024, holding her remedy lay with the Commission.
The panel reversed. Applying Cort v. Ash, 422 U.S. 66 (1975), it held that CREAMMA carries an implied private right of action, because the anti-discrimination provisions would be, in the court's words, meaningless and unenforceable without one. It went further: the Legislature never gave the Commission authority to enforce those provisions against ordinary employers. A New Jersey licensee is two things at once, and nobody has been auditing the second one.
Which is where this stops being a compliance question and starts being a number. A buyer's counsel asks for all five documents in the first diligence request. An empty folder does not read as a regulatory problem, because four of the five are optional. It reads as exposure nobody has sized, and that is what buyers turn into a holdback. Payroll is a different conversation; I took it apart in the budtender piece. Every business I take to the board gets this folder built first. Your employment counsel, not your broker, tells you what belongs in it.
I have never seen a workplace policy binder raise an asking price. I have watched a missing one lower a net. These five documents are the cheapest paperwork in a New Jersey cannabis business and the easiest item on any diligence list to produce in advance, which is exactly why their absence tells a buyer something. It says the owner optimized for what the Commission inspects and ignored what a plaintiff can file, and a buyer who learns that about your workplace file starts wondering what else in the business runs on a verbal understanding.
Build it now, while nobody is reading it. Three months before a sale it is a diligence item. Today it is a weekend.