Proposal to ban medical marijuana patients from workplace dies in divided Oregon House

(Daily Journal of Commerce) The sponsor of a bill to allow Oregon employers to ban medical marijuana from the workplace said on Monday he’ll keep pressing the issue, after the bill died in committee, failing by one vote. “Every session I come back, as an employer, I’ll be bringing it back,” said Rep. Bruce Hanna, R-Roseburg, owner of Automatic Vending Service.

The full House of Representatives voted last week on a motion to pull House Bill 3052 from the Committee on Business and Labor, where it had languished since a public hearing in March. The committee’s chair, Rep. Mike Schaufler, D-Happy Valley, cosponsored the bill with Hanna but could not secure the votes to get it out of committee.

The House voted 29-29 on the motion, which would have brought the bill to the House floor for a vote, bypassing the committee process. All 29 “no” votes were cast by Democrats.

In 2007, the same bill was introduced but died in committee. The bill would allow employers to prohibit workers from using marijuana during working hours or arriving at work under the influence.

“I just want an opportunity to say we can prohibit our employees from consuming or possessing (marijuana) during the work hours,” Hanna said.

Oregon business leaders want to discriminate against medical marijuana patients on the job

No, you want to prohibit people who consume or possess marijuana from becoming or being your employee.  Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Act already states:

475.340 Limitations on reimbursement of costs and employer accommodation. Nothing in ORS 475.300 to 475.346 shall be construed to require:

(1) A government medical assistance program or private health insurer to reimburse a person for costs associated with the medical use of marijuana; or

(2) An employer to accommodate the medical use of marijuana in any workplace.

What Rep. Hanna and Rep. Schauffler don’t like about the law is that medical marijuana causes failures on pre-employment and random pee tests, and they want to be able to fire anyone they detect as having non-impairing THC-COOH marijuana metabolites in their system.  What they don’t like is that medical marijuana patients are not medicating in the workplace, nor are they impaired at the workplace, but if businesses can’t fire patients for failing a test for non-impairing metabolites, they feel like they are “accommodating” the medical use of marijuana.

Currently there is no protection for patients’ right to work in Oregon statute or case law, but these business leaders fear that when one of them does fire an unimpaired medical marijuana patient, the patient will sue and the courts will determine they weren’t impaired and the firing was unlawful and the business will be on the hook for damages.  They also fear if they can’t discriminate against medical marijuana patients, someday one will be impaired on the job and hurt someone, and the business will be on the hook for damages, even though such an occurrence has not happened in ten years of medical marijuana with over 25,000 patients.  Basically, business wants to enshrine job discrimination against 25,000 citizens into Oregon law because they are afraid of lawsuits.

The simple thing to do would be to grant patients a waiver from workplace pee tests that turn up positive for non-impairing THC-COOH.  But that’s problematic because businesses still want to fire /not hire the 19 out of 20 Oregonian pot smokers who use marijuana for non-medical purposes.  How do you convince Peter Potsmoker that the joint he smoked at a concert on the weekend makes him an unacceptable danger to the workplace when you’ve just given a waiver to Granny Glaucoma or Emily Epilepsy who smoke a joint every night before going to bed?  Allowing medical marijuana patients a pass on pee tests makes the pee tests even more indefensible and illogical than they already are.

Here is the language that was just defeated (additions in italic):

(2) Require an employer to:
(a) Accommodate the medical use of marijuana in any workplace regardless of where the use occurs;
(b) Allow an employee or independent contractor to possess, to consume or to be impaired by the use of marijuana during working hours; or
(c) Allow any person who is impaired by the use of marijuana to remain in the workplace.
(3) Preclude or restrict an employer from establishing or enforcing a policy to achieve or maintain a drug-free workforce.

Since Oregon law is pretty murky on what constitutes “impairment”, you can bet that “impaired by the use of marijuana” means “tests positive for non-impairing THC-COOH metabolites”, and had this bill passed, employers would legally be able to deny employment to all 25,000 of Oregon’s medical marijuana patients.