He blamed the cocaine on his marijuana. The court was not convinced
A manufacturing worker who tested positive for cocaine and marijuana after a workplace fall has lost his workers’ comp claim in an Ohio appeals court.
The worker was a press operator at U.S. Tsubaki Power Transmission for about a year. On August 5, 2022, he was disassembling metal parts using a vise bolted to a table when it slipped. He lost his footing, fell, and injured his hip.
An hour or two later, a drug test came back positive for both cocaine and marijuana.
He acknowledged smoking marijuana three to four times a week but denied using cocaine. His explanation: it must have been in the marijuana.
The employer’s medical expert found cocaine metabolites above the confirmation cutoff and marijuana metabolites at more than four times the threshold. The conclusion: the worker was impaired at the time of the accident, and that impairment directly caused his injury. Cocaine causes altered alertness and inappropriate feelings of competence; marijuana impairs judgment and the ability to respond to unexpected situations.
The claim was denied through the workers’ comp system. The worker challenged it in court in 2023, voluntarily dropped the case, then refiled in March 2025.
That is where the procedural trouble set in.
The trial court gave the worker until September 30, 2025 to name his expert witnesses. He missed it. He was also late on other filings. It was not until February 2026 - more than four months late, just 36 days before trial - that he produced a rebuttal expert, tacked onto his response to the employer’s bid to end the case. The court was blunt: the late disclosure was “not fair and it is unprofessional.” It excluded the report.
Without it, the worker had nothing to counter the employer’s medical evidence. The court ruled in the employer’s favor.
On appeal, the Sixth District rejected all three of the worker’s arguments on October 27, 2026. It found no formal request to file the late report in the trial court record. It also found the employer had taken the right path under Ohio law - proving directly that drug impairment caused the injury, rather than relying on a presumption triggered by the positive test. That meant the worker’s challenges to how the test was conducted were beside the point.
For HR teams running post-accident testing programs, the takeaway is practical. When an employer proves through medical evidence that impairment directly caused an injury, the worker carries a real burden to produce their own expert saying otherwise. Miss that window, and the claim is done.
The appeals court affirmed the trial court’s judgment in favor of the employer.
