The American Medical Association and many other major medical organizations have recognized addiction as a chronic medical condition since 1987, yet many employers still terminate workers for the most predictable symptom of that condition: relapse. A single positive drug test can end a career, even when the employee seeks immediate treatment. This tension reveals a deeper inconsistency within federal disability law. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) identifies addiction as a disability, but it also excludes anyone considered a “current” user of illegal drugs. Courts have interpreted this term so broadly that employees in recovery who relapse once, enter treatment, and return to work may still be denied protection. The result is a legal framework that recognizes addiction as a disease while treating its symptoms as disqualifying misconduct. This contradiction raises urgent questions about how disability law should function in workplaces when relapse is both medically expected and legally penalized.
Legal Background
Substance Use Disorder is defined in clinical medicine as a chronic condition marked by cycles of remission and recurrence. The neurological changes associated with addiction make relapse a common and expected occurrence, even among people who follow treatment recommendations. Medical studies estimate that forty to sixty percent of individuals in treatment experience at least one relapse. In most medical settings, a return of symptoms triggers additional care. In the employment context, however, relapse can lead to immediate termination.
The ADA recognizes addiction as a disability, but it conditions that protection on a significant limitation. Employees who are considered “currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs” are excluded from coverage. Congress never defined what constitutes “current” use, leaving courts to interpret the term. Early cases viewed the exclusion as narrow, intended to prevent individuals who were actively using drugs from claiming disability status. Over time, however, courts broadened the definition to include employees who had relapsed once, stopped using, and entered treatment or even completed rehabilitation programs.
As a result, individuals are often denied protection at the precise moment when accommodation and continued employment could support recovery. Since the statute provides no strict timeline or definition, coverage turns on judicial discretion rather than on objective evidence of ongoing use, job performance, or safety risk.
The current judicial approach to the ADA’s “current use” exclusion is difficult to defend as a matter of statutory construction. Although the statute recognizes addiction as a protected disability, courts have interpreted the exclusion for current drug use so broadly that it often negates that protection altogether. This reading conflicts with the text, structure, and interpretive principles of the ADA by transforming an undefined and limited exclusion into a categorical threshold bar. Rather than asking whether an employee poses a present safety risk or could perform the job with reasonable accommodation, courts frequently deny coverage at the outset based on judicial discretion about how recently drug use occurred. The cases below illustrate how this approach operates in practice and why it functions as a broad barrier for employees in recovery.
Legal Argument
- Judicial Interpretations and Expansion of the “Current Use” Exclusion
In Zenor v. El Paso Healthcare Systems, the Fifth Circuit held that a pharmacist who had abstained from cocaine use for approximately five weeks and entered treatment was nevertheless a “current” user. By treating recent abstinence as legally indistinguishable from ongoing use, the court excluded Zenor from ADA protection entirely, relieving the employer of any obligation to consider reasonable accommodations such as reassignment to a day shift with supervision or transfer to a facility without access to pharmaceutical cocaine.
The Fourth Circuit extended this reasoning in Shafer v. Preston Memorial Hospital Corporation. Shafer, a nurse anesthetist, admitted to fentanyl addiction, entered an inpatient rehabilitation program with her employer’s assistance, and completed treatment. She was terminated on the day she finished rehab. The court held that because she had used drugs in the weeks and months preceding her discharge, she remained a current user under the statute. Rehabilitation, the court reasoned, could not restore coverage without producing “absurd results” that might limit employers’ ability to discipline drug use. As a result, the safe harbor provisions, which protect those who successfully complete a rehab program and are no longer using drugs, were rendered effectively irrelevant once recent use was established.
By contrast, Lott v. Thomas Jefferson University demonstrates that such expansive readings are not compelled by the statute. In Lott, the plaintiff had been drug-free for over three months and completed a supervised outpatient rehabilitation program. Although the employer argued that his long history of addiction justified treating him as a “current” user, the court rejected that position and held that a reasonable jury could find that his drug use was no longer ongoing. Rather than collapsing recovery into continued disqualification, the court preserved the ADA’s accommodation framework by recognizing that recovery can meaningfully alter an employee’s status.
Taken together, these cases reveal that exclusion under the ADA often turns not on recovery, conduct, or risk, but on judicial discretion in defining “current use.” The same statutory language has been used both to foreclose protection entirely and to allow individualized assessment, exposing the instability of the doctrine.
- Problems with the Current Approach
These cases reveal two major flaws in the prevailing interpretation of the “current use” exclusion. First, courts have expanded the “current use” exclusion beyond what the statutory text and structure support. The ADA does not define “current,” and courts routinely acknowledge the term’s ambiguity. Under established principles of disability law, such ambiguity should be resolved in favor of coverage, not exclusion. Congress declared that the ADA’s purpose is “to provide a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities,” including discrimination arising from “exclusionary qualification standards.” Interpreting “current use” to encompass weeks or months of abstinence undermines that mandate by transforming an ambiguous exclusion into a categorical qualification standard that prevents employees from even being considered for reasonable accommodation.
Second, courts use the expanded definition of “current use” to replace the ADA’s individualized assessment framework with categorical assumptions about relapse. In cases such as Shafer, courts reason that recent drug use shows an ongoing condition that has not “permanently ended,” effectively presuming continued impairment rather than examining rehabilitation status, present conduct, or job performance. This approach substitutes generalized assumptions about addiction for the individualized inquiry the ADA otherwise requires.
The statute already permits employers to prohibit workplace drug use, discipline misconduct, and terminate employees who violate drug policies. It also permits employers to exclude employees who pose a direct threat to workplace safety, but only after an individualized assessment grounded in objective medical evidence and the consideration of reasonable accommodations. Critically, the statute distinguishes discipline for past misconduct and exclusion from disability coverage altogether. Even when an employee has violated a drug policy, the ADA ordinarily requires courts to ask whether the employee is currently using illegal drugs or poses a present safety risk. By treating any recent violation as proof of “current use,” courts collapse these distinct inquiries, converting past misconduct into a categorical threshold bar on coverage.
- A Narrower Interpretation of Current Use
The inconsistencies reflected in Zenor and Shafer do not stem from an unavoidable command of the statute, but from an interpretive choice. Nothing in the ADA requires courts to treat relapse as categorically equivalent to ongoing illegal use. A narrower construction of “current use,” limited to employees who are actively using illegal drugs at the time of the employment decision, or whose conduct demonstrates ongoing use at that time, would better align with the statute’s text and structure.
Such a reading preserves the function of the exclusion while preventing it from undermining the ADA’s commitment to an individualized assessment. The statute already provides employers with tools to address workplace safety and misconduct. Interpreting “current use” in a strictly temporal sense would not immunize employees from discipline, but would instead require courts to distinguish between ongoing drug use and recovery in progress.
This approach restores coherence to the statute by allowing the safe harbor provisions to serve their purpose. Employees who have stopped using illegal drugs and successfully completed treatment would no longer be categorically excluded before any assessment of job performance, accommodation, or risk can occur. In this way, the ADA’s protections would extend to individuals in recovery without undermining employer authority.
Counterargument
Courts that adopt a broad interpretation of the “current use” exclusion argue that such an approach is necessary to preserve employer authority and prevent employees from shielding recent illegal drug use by invoking the ADA. As the Fourth Circuit explained in Shafer, limiting “current use” to the precise moment of termination would produce “absurd results” by allowing employees to avoid discipline by simply entering rehabilitation after being caught. Under the view of this court, for instance, Congress intended the exclusion to apply to drug use occurring “recently enough to justify a reasonable belief” that it remains an ongoing problem, even if the employee is drug-free on the day of termination. A broader construction, courts argue, ensures that employers may enforce drug-free workplace policies without being forced into accommodation analyses whenever an employee has a recent history of addiction. This concern, however, overstates the consequences of a narrower reading and misunderstands the structure of the ADA. Interpreting “current use” in a strictly temporal sense does not prevent employers from disciplining employees for misconduct, enforcing drug-testing policies, or removing individuals who pose genuine workplace safety risks. The ADA expressly preserves employer authority to prohibit illegal drug use at work and to apply conduct standards. What a narrower construction does prevent is the categorical exclusion of employees who have ceased using drugs and entered treatment before any assessment of these individual factors occurs. The statute already contains mechanisms to address the precise risks courts invoke. Expanding the “current use” exclusion is therefore unnecessary to protect employers and instead functions to disrupt the ADA’s core goal of individualized evaluation and support.
Conclusion
The treatment of addiction under the ADA reveals a persistent interpretive inconsistency. Although the statute recognizes addiction as a disability, courts have interpreted the “current use” exclusion so broadly that it often nullifies that protection for employees in recovery. By equating relapse with ongoing illegal use, courts transform an undefined and limited exclusion into a categorical bar that prevents individualized assessment, accommodation, or consideration of present risk. This approach conflicts with the text, structure, and interpretive principles of the ADA, which rely on objective evaluation rather than assumptions about disability-related behavior. A narrower interpretation of “current use,” limited to employees who are actively using illegal drugs at the time of the employment decision, would preserve employers’ ability to address misconduct and safety concerns while restoring coherence to the statute. Interpreting the exclusion in this way would protect individuals in recovery without shielding unlawful conduct, ensuring that relapse does not automatically foreclose the possibility of continued employment and livelihood.