MMJ patient and former Wal-Mart employee Casias

The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has called on all Americans to boycott Wal-Mart, to protest the possibly-illegal firing of 29-year-old Joseph Casias. Casias, who suffers from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor, was recently fired from his job at Wal-Mart for using medical marijuana.

Casias had worked at the Battle Creek, MI Wal-Mart store for 5 years, and in 2008 Wal-Mart named Casias Associate of the Year. Nonetheless, this year store managers fired him after he tested positive for marijuana.

Casias is a registered medical marijuana patient in Michigan, where it is legal to use marijuana for medicinal purposes. Casias says that he only uses medical marijuana to relieve his pain, and never used marijuana before or during work hours. After an injury on the job, Casias underwent a routine workplace drug screening, which revealed the presence of marijuana in his system. When Casias showed Wal-Mart managers his medical marijuana card, however, they refused to accept or honor it.

Not only are Wal-Mart’s actions ethically questionable, but they may also be illegal. MPP argues that, by firing Casias, the store violated Michigan’s Medical Marijuana Act, which forbids employers to discipline employees for medical marijuana use. Regardless, the company refuses to rehire the seriously-ill MMJ patient.

Consequently, MPP is asking shoppers to boycott Wal-Mart for its “discriminatory policy of firing employees who are legal medical marijuana patients under state law.”

As Karen O’Keefe, an MPP director and a drafter of Michigan’s medical marijuana law, pointed out: “Would Wal-Mart also fire someone for taking doctor-prescribed Percocet, or any of the other legal medications sold in many of Wal-Mart’s own stores?”