Oregon Drugfree Workplace Group spreads MedMJ falsehoods
newsreview.info - Serving Roseburg & Douglas County, Oregon - News
WILBUR — Employers and workers who intervene in a co-worker’s substance abuse are the only ones who will stem the rising rate of workplace drug and alcohol abuse, said Dan Harmon, chairman of the Drugfree Workplace Legislative Work Group.Annually, substance abuse costs Oregon $5.9 billion.Included in that figure are health care costs and spending on programs related to substance abuse, on which Oregon spends $813 million annually.And then there’s the loss of productivity in the state, amounting to $4.15 billion in lost earnings.
The costs Harmon cited came from an ECONorthwest study.
Citing figures from the U.S. Department of Labor, Harmon said the American economy loses $81 billion in productivity annually because of substance abuse.
Which gets no link from the newspaper article, whose title is never named in the article, and couldn’t be found after I tried a few extensive searches out at the ECONorthwest website. I always like to read these studies when I see scary numbers coming from supporters of urine testing.
Most of the time when opponents are citing these “substance abuse costs” and “loss of productivity”, they are really ginning up the numbers by conflating the abuse of drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, which do create huge costs, with the popularity of marijuana, which creates the large numbers of “drug abusers” needed to scare the public.
Jon Gettman at DrugScience.org explains:
Over two-thirds (71.3%) of the costs of drug abuse are attributed to lost productivity…. Even though marijuana is the most popular illegal drug in the United States, these factors are disproportionately associated with chronic heroin and cocaine addiction. Furthermore $39 billion in lost productivity is … for all drug-related offenses (regardless of the drug). This is not a cost of drug abuse but, rather, the costs of current policies.
The health care costs associated with drug abuse represent a much smaller share of the economic and social costs of drug abuse…. Marijuana use does account for portions of the treatment and prevention expenditures, however it should be noted that in 2005, for example, 56.7% of treatment referrals for marijuana were generated by the criminal justice system. Many of the economic costs of marijuana use are actually generated by contemporary marijuana policies.The cost of goods and services lost to crime is the only category of the economic costs of drug abuse that is substantially related to marijuana use, and here primarily through the costs of enforcing the nation’s marijuana laws. … Marijuana arrests accounted for 45% of all drug arrests in 2002, for example, and consequently account for $16.4 billion in law enforcement costs.
When addressing costs associated with incarceration, law enforcement, and supply reduction it is important to note that these are costs associated with the implementation of current public policies that are brought about by the existing laws criminalizing marijuana use. These are not effects of marijuana use.
The yellow journalism from the NewsReview continues the Harmon story:
Oregon ranks among the highest in the nation in categories such as binge drinking, heavy alcohol use, substance abuse in the workplace, fatalities and injuries in the workplace, and positive testing for drugs, Harmon said.
Marijuana use among adults in the state is at 6 percent, 50 percent higher than the nation.
Despite pseudoephedrine being pulled from store shelves in 2006, and the subsequent reduction in meth labs, methamphetamine abuse in Oregon continues to worsen, Harmon said.
In 2005, Oregon ranked seventh in the nation for methamphetamine abuse.
That same year, Oregon ranked fourth in the nation for prescription drug abuse.
Over 50 percent of property crimes in the state are linked to substance abuse.
Here we have the set-up - scare people with the crime attributable to hard drug abuse while pointing out how popular marijuana use is in the state.
At the same time, Oregon contends with the impact of medical marijuana use and growth across the state.
Originally designed for the seriously ill, Harmon said Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Act has now allowed 16,000 people, many of whom are in the workplace, to become cardholders for medical marijuana.
Legislative changes now allow those who suffer from severe pain, not just chronic pain, to apply for a card, Harmon said.
Only 451 of those cardholders are cancer patients, ECONorthwest has found.
This is a common tactic by drug warriors in Oregon; the canard that medical marijuana was intended only for people that are in the last stages of dying from cancer or AIDS, and that somehow, 16,000 people with medical marijuana cards is some sort of “abuse”. If someone can use medical marijuana to alleviate their conditions enough to be able to work, doesn’t that increase productivity in the workplace. Does Harmon think 16,000 unemployable medical marijuana patients helps productivity?
While only 451 of Oregon’s patients list cancer as their qualifying condition, Oregon’s cancer registry database, OSCaR, shows that over 17,000 Oregonians could qualify for medical marijuana for their cancer diagnoses alone.
And Harmon’s claim about severe pain versus chronic pain is patently false. The Oregon Medical Marijuana Act was last amended in 2005; it added Alzheimer’s agitation to the list of qualifying conditions. But the original Measure 67 that passed in 1998 listed among its qualifying conditions:
SECTION 3. (2) “Debilitating medical condition” means: (a) Cancer, glaucoma, positive status for human immunodeficiency virus or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or treatment for these conditions; (b) A medical condition or treatment for a medical condition that produces, for a specific patient, one or more of the following: (i) Cachexia; (ii) Severe pain; (iii) Severe nausea; (iv) Seizures, including but not limited to seizures caused by epilepsy; or (v) Persistent muscle spasms, including but not limited to spasms caused by multiple sclerosis; or (c) Any other medical condition or treatment for a medical condition adopted by the division by rule or approved by the division pursuant to a petition submitted pursuant to section 14 of this Act.
But Harmon seems to think that Oregon’s law could be more restrictive, like in other medical marijuana states:
In comparison, if Oregon’s medical marijuana law was written like Colorado’s, limiting prescription cards to only the truly debilitated, there would be fewer than 1,500 cardholders in the state, Harmon said. And that would eliminate the need for employers to accommodate cardholders.
That’s funny, because Colorado’s medical marijuana law was modeled on the template of the Oregon law. In fact, when we look at the text of Colorado’s Measure 20:
Section 14. Medical use of marijuana for persons suffering from debilitating medical conditions. (1)(a) “Debilitating medical condition” means: (I) Cancer, glaucoma, positive status for human immunodeficiency virus, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or treatment for such conditions; (II) A chronic or debilitating disease or medical condition, or treatment for such conditions, which produces, for a specific patient, one or more of the following, and for which, in the professional opinion of the patient’s physician, such condition or conditions reasonably may be alleviated by the medical use of marijuana: cachexia; severe pain; severe nausea; seizures, including those that are characteristic of epilepsy; or persistent muscle spasms, including those that are characteristic of multiple sclerosis; or (III) Any other medical condition, or treatment for such condition, approved by the state health agency, pursuant to its rule making authority or its approval of any petition submitted by a patient or physician as provided in this section.
If it were a work of fiction, Colorado’s Act would be guilty of plagiarism. The qualifying conditions are nearly word-for-word equal.
This is a continued assault on Oregon’s incredibly successful medical marijuana program. Opponents want the law repealed or severely curtailed, due to fears about the conflict over federal “drug free workplace” laws and Oregon’s program. To justify these changes, opponents like to stoke fears, as above, about the incidence of workplace accidents and fatalities, allegedly due to substance abuse.
However, workplace accident and fatality data in Oregon tell a different story. Since the implementation of 1998’s medical marijuana act in 1999, workplace fatalities dropped from 55 to 47, non-fatal injuries with no workday loss dropped from 3.5 to 2.4 per 100K, and lost workday injuries dropped from 3.5 to 2.8 per 100K.
In my opinion, the true reason for the workplace opposition to medical marijuana is simple: it undermines the regime of drug testing. For if you are a non-patient marijuana user working side-by-side with a known medical marijuana patient, who proves to be a reliable, safe, productive worker, how then does industry justify testing your urine for marijuana metabolites under the claims that it will make you unreliable, unsafe, and unproductive? And once the testing for marijuana is undermined, the testing for all illicit substances falls, because there are not enough employable users of harder drugs to justify the costs of (and profit from) the drug testing.
Tags: Drugfree Workplace, Oregon
