Albany Democrat Herald: AP News
ALBANY, Ore. (AP) — Dan Harmon is not celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act.Harmon chairs the Drugfree Workplace Legislative Work Group, which wants the state Legislature to make substantial changes to the law approved by voters in November 1998.
One of the first orders of business, Harmon said, is to reintroduce Senate Bill 465, which would exempt employers from having to accommodate medical marijuana users, no matter when or where they use the drug. The Senate approved the bill in 2007, but it couldn’t clear the House.
The work group also wants to delete some of the conditions currently approved for treatment with marijuana, restrict the approval of new conditions, require employer notification when a worker applies for a medical-marijuana card and stiffen penalties for those who violate the act.
In his talk to the Albany chamber, he cited several reasons why employers would want to think twice about hiring medical marijuana users, including concerns about workplace safety, legal liability and the potential loss of federal contracts. He also said Oregon’s medical marijuana law is being widely abused, and the law itself “says something about permissiveness in this state, and we’ve got to stop this permissiveness.”
This is a huge battle looming in my state. Harmon and the business leaders want to eviscerate Oregon’s successful medical marijuana program, which now boasts over 20,000 registered patients. Sandee Burbank of Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse, a pro-medmj group in Oregon, recounts a tale of registering for this presentation as a non-chamber member and paying the $20 non-member fee. When she arrived to the meeting, her name was on a list and those organizing the event would not let her attend. This gentle grandmother was pushed and manhandled as she was forced out of the event, and she was barely able to recoup her $20 fee.
The business leaders in Oregon have the following goals on the table for the 2009 legislative session:
- Reintroduce SB 465 to confirm that employers are not obligated to accommodate medical marijuana in any workplace, regardless of where the use occurs. (Basically, it means an employer could hang a “Medical Marijuana Patients Need Not Apply” sign on their business and could fire any patient without cause simply for having a card.)
- Reintroduce SB 690 to establish Drugfree Workplace program standards and protect employers from lawsuits for false positives (in other words, if they fire you for failing a drug test even though you don’t take drugs, you can’t sue) and amend Workers Compensation law to make it clear that failing a drug test establishes a rebuttable presumption that a worker’s consumption was a major contributing cause of the accident (in other words, failing a drug test means you were impaired and drugs caused the accident, regardless if that’s true or not).
- Introduce a new bill that would amend the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act to stop abuse. The statute
would be amended as follows: - Reduce the quantity in possession to 2 oz., reduce the number of plants grown to 3, establish maximum reasonable plant size and prohibit communal grows (in other words, reduce possession limits down from 24 ounces and 24 plants and make it virtually impossible for the most seriously-ill patients to get enough medicine).
- Require certification of a bona fide physician-patient relationship of a specific duration before a card may be issued (in other words, make medical marijuana “clinics” impossible and require the patient to have their own physician make the medical marijuana recommendation, which will unduly burden most patients, since many doctors belong to HMOs that won’t let them sign for cards, and many more are ignorant of cannabis as medicine and fear signing for cards).
- Require verification of dosage, frequency of use and method of consumption from the doctor (in other words, require doctors to make exacting recommendations on cannabis use, even though such exacting standards have never been studied or identified in medical literature).
- Require unsuccessful use of Marinol before being granted a Medical Marijuana card (in other words, force patients to use a mostly-ineffective drug that has much more severe side effects than marijuana and costs $20 per pill… that is, if the doctor nervous about writing marijuana recommendations will even want the hassle of writing a prescription for a federally-controlled Schedule III pill).
- Require notification of the employer when an employee makes an application for a card (in other words, you need your boss’s permission to use marijuana as medicine, if he’d give such permission, otherwise you’re deciding between your healthcare and your job).
The maddening thing is that Harmon and these business leaders are attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t exist! The underlying premise is that medical marijuana patients in the workplace are going to lead to safety issues. However, during the ten years that OMMA has been in force, workplace fatalities, workplace injuries requiring time off, and workplace injuries requiring no time off have all declined.
- Workplace Fatalities: 2000 = 55; 2005 = 47 (earliest and latest data available)
- Workplace Injuries, Lost Workday: 1998 = 3.4 per 100K; 2006 = 2.8 per 100K
- Workplace Injuries, No Workday loss: 1998 = 3.5 per 100K; 2006 = 2.4 per 100K
That doesn’t mean medical marijuana made the workplace safer; it just means that if there is some increase in workplace danger due to medical marijuana, it’s not showing up in the data.
