EVERY demographic has increased its support for marijuana legalization since 2005

Yesterday we revealed The Top Ten “Reefer Madness” Stories of 2011.  Today we continue our Year-End Retrospective with a look at the biggest news stories of scientific research into cannabis, public opinion polls on legalization, and statistical research on cannabis consumers.  We call it The Top Ten Cannabis Science Stories of 2011.  Tomorrow we’ll continue with The Top Ten “Stupid Stoner Stories” of 2011 and Friday we conclude with the The Top Ten People in Cannabis of 2011.

The Top Ten Cannabis Science Stories of 2011 (audio mp3)

10. The Carbon Footprint of Cannabis

Cannabis Karri reported on a study that measured just how much electricity we’re using to grow cannabis indoors.

A new report conducted and published by Even Mills, PhD, a respected and long time energy analyst along with Staff Scientists at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory has concluded that Americans spend an amazing 1% of the entire national electricity consumption, or the equivalent of the output of seven large power plants on growing cannabis.

Since medical marijuana use has become so much more popular, and most of those states do not have a dispensary program, many more people are learning to grow marijuana indoors. The 20 terawatt-hours per year that marijuana growers use is due to the bright, often 24 hours a day lighting and an air change rate 60 times higher than a norml home. Even a modest indoor garden can have the same energy consumption rate of an entire data center. Since indoor cultivation of cannabis is a necessity to hide operations from authorities and others the energy bill to growers is about $5 billion each year. That extra energy to produce American cannabis is equal to the energy consumption of an extra 2 million average US homes. It also, unfortunately, produces greenhouse gas pollution equal to 3 million cars according to the new research.

9. Pot smokers are thinner and smarter than average

We have all suffered through jokes about cannabis consumers being fat, stupid couch potatoes.  So it was a joy in 2011 when two international studies found us to be thinner than our non-toking counterparts…

“We found that cannabis users are less likely to be obese than non-users,” [researchers said]. “We were so surprised, we thought we had [made] a mistake. Or that our results were due to the sample we studied. So we turned to another completely independent sample and found exactly the same association.”

…and smarter, too!

A new British study finds … men with high childhood IQs were up to two times more likely to use illegal drugs than their lower-scoring counterparts. Girls with high IQs were up to three times more likely to use drugs as adults. A high IQ is defined as a score between 107 and 158. An average IQ is 100. The study appears in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

None of this means taking up pot smoking is going to shed points and boost IQ.  It does mean that some popular stereotypes about us are completely unfounded.

8. Two-thirds of patients surveyed substitute marijuana for prescription medications

Many a medical marijuana activist can tell anecdotes of patients who’ve reduced or eliminated their need for opiate pain killers by substituting cannabis.  This year, Berkeley Patients Group surveyed their patients and found two-out-of-three had done just that.

In an anonymous survey, 66% of 350 clients at the Berkeley (Calif.) Patients Group, a medical marijuana dispensary, said that they use marijuana as a prescription drug substitute. Their reasons: Cannabis offered better symptom control with fewer side effects than did prescription drugs.

Those with pain symptoms said that marijuana has less addiction potential than do opioids. Others said marijuana helped to reduce the dose of other medications.

Speaking of the addiction potential of opioids…

7. Oxycontin is five times the “gateway drug” as marijuana

Prohibitionists have been using the “Gateway Drug” scare for years to frighten the public about legalization.  Despite every study blowing the concept out of the water, it still resonates with a large segment of the voters.  So I decided to take a look at the data to find out which drug is really the one with the greatest correlation to hard drug use, and it definitely wasn’t cannabis!

We cross-referenced the NSDUH numbers based on whether someone had ever tried marijuana. We found that only 1.5% of people who have toked became monthly cocaine users. For ecstasy, crack, meth, heroin, LSD, and PCP, less than 1% of the people who’ve tried pot are using those drugs regularly. Meanwhile, 2.9% of the people who’ve ever tried an legal analgesic (pain reliever) are regular cocaine users. For ecstasy, crack, and meth, more than 1% of who tried analgesics are regular users. People who tried analgesics are more than twice as likely as people who tried pot to use heroin regularly and three times more likely to use LSD regularly.

But if opponents want to cling to the idea that we should do everything in our power to stop someone from smoking that first marijuana joint, lest they become illegal drug addicts, then it is time to prohibit Vicodin, Lortab, Lorcet, and Oxycontin, those powerful legal opioid pain killers. The first Vicodin/Lortab/Lorcet leads to almost three times the risk of becoming a non-pot illegal drug user than the first joint and almost the same risk as smoking a joint every month. That first Oxycontin is more than five times the risk for drug abuse than the first joint.

6. Drug testing is still unreliable, inaccurate, unnecessary, invasive, and counter-productive

We drug test our citizens when we suspect they’re committing a crime, when they’re applying for a job, when they’re going to school, and when they’re in an accident.  Yet drug detection for marijuana is so unreliable and unscientific that its use is an affront to all free people.

First it is the “drug dog” that police and courts believe are akin to infallible scientific instruments instead of animals with instincts to please their human masters.

The accuracy of drug- and explosives-sniffing dogs is affected by human handlers’ beliefs, possibly in response to subtle, unintentional cues, UC Davis researchers have found.

The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present.

Next it is the “drug lab” that may mishandle as many as one in ten tests.

An Indiana state lab wrongly reported 1 in 10 marijuana cases as positive, including some that were deliberately manipulated, an audit report indicated.

The audit’s findings showed errors in about 200 of 2,000 marijuana tests reported to law enforcement as having positive results, the Star said. This includes about 50 results the report said were consciously manipulated by lab workers.

Part of the justification for testing us for employment is workplace safety.  Yet, in medical marijuana states where tens or hundreds of thousands of citizens are legally using cannabis, we’ve seen drastic declines in workplace danger.

Prior to the beginning of the medical marijuana program [in Oregon], workplace injuries and illnesses that contributed to a lost workday stood at 3.4 per 100 full-time workers; in 2009 that rate is 2.3 per 100, a decline of 32%.  No-time-lost injuries and illnesses declined 40%, from 3.5 to 2.1 per 100.  Fatalities are down from 3.3 to 1.9 per 100, a drop of 42%.

These declines occurred while the medical marijuana patient registry grew by an average of a little more than 50% per year.

Another egregious use of drug testing is to make it a requirement of citizens seeking welfare assistance.  Florida’s law to do just that has been blocked while its (un-)constitutionality is determined, but in the time it was in effect, it cost Florida more than it saved.  It also found that welfare recipients were less likely to turn up positive than the general public.

The Department of Central Florida’s (DCF) region tested 40 applicants and only two tested positive for drugs, officials said. One of the tests is being appealed.

DCF said it has been referring applicants to clinics where drug screenings cost between $30 and $35. The applicant pays for the test out of his or her own pocket and then the state reimburses him if they test comes back negative.

Therefore, the 38 applicants in the Central Florida area, who tested negative, were reimbursed at least $30 each and cost taxpayers $1,140.

Meanwhile, the state is saving less than $240 a month by refusing benefits to those two applicants who tested positive.

Finally, the unintended consequences of drug testing became more apparent.  When marijuana is the drug that is the hardest to conceal on a drug test, people will turn to drugs that are easier to conceal.

As I looked at the data, I noticed that in the span from 2005 to 2011, the positive test rate for marijuana for all workplace drug tests (pre-employment, random, and post-accident) declined 20%, from 2.5% of approximately 2.4 million tests to 2.0%.  That’s about 12,000 fewer cannabis consumers who were caught by a pee test.

Meanwhile, oxycodone positives have increased 96% for all urine testing, although these tests are administered about one tenth as often (280,000) for oxycodone as for cannabis (2,400,000).  This despite the facts that while marijuana metabolites may be detected in urine for weeks, oxycodone metabolites are flushed from one’s system in two or three days.  Furthermore, random positives for oxycodone (1.20%) are almost twice as great and post-accident positives for oxycodone (1.80%) are nearly three-times greater than pre-employment positives for oxycodone (0.65%), which suggests to me that the pre-employment screens don’t work very well at keeping oxycodone users out of the workplace.

5. For past two years, more Americans arrested for marijuana than all other drugs combined despite arrest protection for America’s One Million Legal Marijuana Users

When somebody mentions “The War on Drugs”, remind them what we’re really talking about is a “War on Marijuana”.

Nationally, there were 1,638,846 drug arrests reported to the FBI, with 52.1% of those arrests for marijuana charges.  Last year, 51.6% of all drug arrests were for marijuana, showing a slight increase in marijuana as the majority of all drug arrests.  The last time marijuana made up a majority of the “War on Drugs” was 1985, when 55.6% of all drug arrests were for marijuana.

Keep in mind that these annual marijuana arrests continue to climb even as we reduce the number of marijuana users eligible for arrest in the medical marijuana state, users who grow and use the most marijuana.

Between one to one-and-a-half million people are legally authorized by their state to use marijuana in the United States, according to data compiled by NORML from state medical marijuana registries and patient estimates.  Assuming usage of one-half to one gram of cannabis medicine per day per patient and an average retail price of $320 per ounce, these legal consumers represent a $2.3 to $6.2 billion dollar market annually.

4. Drug Czar claims medical marijuana makes more young people smoke pot, despite fewer teens smoking pot

A popular refrain of the Drug Czar is that by calling marijuana “medicine”, we lead young people to think it is less dangerous, and therefore, use goes up.

“Emerging research reveals potential links between state laws permitting access to smoked medical marijuana and higher rates of marijuana use,” said Gil Kerlikowske, Director of National Drug Control Policy. “In light of what we know regarding the serious harm of illegal drug use, I urge every family – but particularly those in states targeted by pro-drug political campaigns – to redouble their efforts to shield young people from serious harm by educating them about the real health and safety consequences caused by illegal drug use.”

Except that medical marijuana’s been around on the West Coast for over a dozen years.  Between 2003 and 2009, as more states have adopted medical marijuana, nationally the rate of monthly teen use is on the decline.

In fact, eleven of the thirteen states that had medical marijuana as of 2009 saw declines in teen marijuana use, and the five that added it after 2003 saw double-digit declines.

From 2003 to 2009 in California, monthly teen use is up only 0.26%.  In Colorado, teen use is up 3.77% in that time frame.  Yet Wyoming, a state without medical marijuana, saw the greatest increase of 5.18%.  Furthermore, looking back before 2003, to 1996 and 1998 when the West Coast legalized medical marijuana, teen use is lower now than then.

3. The people really, really want to ask the President about the legalization of marijuana that half of them support

This year, the esteemed Gallup Poll finally recorded half of the US population in support of legalizing marijuana.

Gallup reports that the 50% nationwide support for legalization also represents the first time support has outweighed opposition.  Only 46% of Americans believe marijuana should remain criminalized, with 4% undecided.

Support for marijuana legalization remains greatest in the Western states (55%) and majorities support legalization in the Midwest (54%) and East (51%).  Only voters in the South still oppose marijuana legalization (44%).  Men still support legalization at a much greater rate than women (55% vs. 46%).

Support is also greatest among younger Americans (62%), Democrats (57%), and liberals (69%).  However, support for legalization has increased even in demographics generally opposed to legalization.  Compared to Gallup’s poll last year, support increased 4% points in the South, 12% points in the Midwest, and 6% points among 50-64, but fell 1% among 65+.  Support rose 6% points among Republicans, and 4% points among conservatives. Marijuana legalization is becoming more popular with just about everyone.

President Obama, seeking input from the people on policy questions, was stunned once again to find…

On the “We the People” petitions site of Whitehouse.gov, as of this writing, NORML’s “Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol” petition is #1 by a long shot.  It has garnered over 42,000 signatures.  It needed 5,000 signatures in 30 days to generate an official response from the administration, a figure it had topped in just over three hours.

And when he asked for videos from citizens on policy issues, another stunning result…

The top question, submitted by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, garnered 13,842 votes – over 1% of all votes cast (people could vote for more than one question).

As a police officer, I saw how waging the war on drugs has cost a trillion dollars and thousands of lives but does nothing to reduce drug use. Should we discuss legalizing marijuana and other drugs, which would eliminate the violent criminal market?

Of the 193,060 people who voted more than 7% voted for the LEAP question.  That’s about one in fourteen people who took the time to Ask Obama.

2. National Cancer Institute drama over anti-tumoral effects of cannabis

A very high-profile battle over scientific integrity played itself out on the webpage of Cancer.gov, the government’s site for the National Cancer Institute.  It began when the site surprisingly updated its summary page on cannabis and cannabinoids.

The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.

Cannabinoids may cause antitumor effects by various mechanisms, including induction of cell death, inhibition of cell growth, and inhibition of tumor angiogenesis and metastasis. [9-11] Cannabinoids appear to kill tumor cells but do not affect their nontransformed counterparts and may even protect them from cell death. These compounds have been shown to induce apoptosis in glioma cells in culture and induce regression of glioma tumors in mice and rats.

Then it appeared that somebody pressured NCI to revise its update to better align with the government’s prohibition of cannabis.  The paragraphs above were removed and replaced with:

The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. Though no relevant surveys of practice patterns exist, it appears that physicians caring for cancer patients who prescribe medicinal Cannabis predominantly do so for symptom management.

Then NCI updated the “clinical studies” portion of the website to again highlight the anti-tumoral effects:

One study in mice and rats suggested that cannabinoids may have a protective effect against the development of certain types of tumors.

Decreased incidences of benign tumors(polyps and adenomas) in other organs(mammary gland, uterus, pituitary, testis, and pancreas)were also noted in the rats.

Cannabinoids may cause antitumor effects by various mechanisms, including induction of cell death, inhibition of cell growth, and inhibition of tumorangiogenesis and metastasis.

Cannabinoids appear to kill tumor cells but do not affect their nontransformed counterparts and may even protect them from cell death.

1. Colorado’s 5ng/mL per se DUID bill dies again as new research backs higher thresholds for regular users

We tackled drug testing above in #6, but this story takes #1 for showing how science and the scientific method can actually beat back prohibition.  Colorado had proposed a 5ng of THC per milliliter of blood (5ng/mL) per se DUID, meaning: if you test positive on a drug test above 5ng/mL, you’re automatically guilty of DUI, whether you were impaired or not.

Naturally, many medical marijuana patients in Colorado complained that they are such frequent and heavy users of cannabis that they would never be under such a threshold.  Furthermore, most of them have developed a tolerance to cannabis’ effects that allows them to drive under its influence without impairment, much as we understand an “until you know how [Pill X] affects you, do not drive or operate heavy machinery” warning on a pharmaceutical.

The “pot critic” of Denver’s WestWord, William Breathes, decided to become the experiment by abstaining from cannabis use under controlled conditions.  After sixteen hours and a night’s sleep, upon awakening, presumably clean and sober, Breathes was tested at 13ng/mL.  This anecdotal report, splashed all over the Denver media, was also backed up by the latest scientific research:

It concludes: “A threshold of 2-3ng/ml THC as an indicator of recent drug use (i.e, smoking within the previous 6 hours) as recommended by Huestis et al appears to be valid only for occasional users. Heavy users might exhibit measurable cannabinoid concentrations in blood, even if the last cannabis use was more than 24 hours ago.… Therefore, cannabinoid concentrations in heavy users’ blood from a later elimination phase might not be distinguished from an acute use of an occasional user.”

Marijuana positives have dropped 20%. Oxycodone positives have nearly doubled. Drug Testing Success?

According to a press release from Quest Diagnostics, the nation’s leading abuser of Americans’ Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights provider of workplace drug screening, “Hydrocodone and Oxycodones Lead U.S. General Workforce Positives, Outranked Only by Marijuana, According to Quest Diagnostics Drug Testing Index™”.

As I looked at the data, I noticed that in the span from 2005 to 2011, the positive test rate for marijuana for all workplace drug tests (pre-employment, random, and post-accident) declined 20%, from 2.5% of approximately 2.4 million tests to 2.0%.  That’s about 12,000 fewer cannabis consumers who were caught by a pee test.

Now if you realize that also means we spent about $50 per test for 2.4 million tests per year, that works out to $120 million worth of pee testing.  If we only got positives for 2.0%, or 48,000 workers, that works out to a cost of $2,500 to catch a pot smoker with a pee test.  From a purely cost-benefit analysis, then, we’d have to assume that a pot smoking employee costs a company more than $2,500 a year for this testing to make any sense.  Or that a drug testing industry, with help from the feds, has successfully scared business into providing itself a steady paycheck.

Oregon's got a lot of pot smokers, yet declining accident and injury rates.

Of course, we don’t cost companies anything more than any other employee costs and certainly less than hungover drinkers and multi-break-taking smokers.  Urine test positives just show an employee is a cannabis consumer, not that they are stoned or have even been stoned recently. Claims of marijuana users having more absenteeism, tardiness, sick day use, productivity, etc. are specious at best, as they fail to account for the illegality of marijuana preventing its users to attain greater incomes and illegality causing its users to miss work for legal issues that wouldn’t plague alcohol drinkers.  Claims of increased workplace dangers are dismissed when we recognize that the medical marijuana states, where there are thousands of employed legal users and thousands more employed illegal users, are seeing declines in workplace fatalities, injuries, accidents, and DUIs.

As these marijuana workplace positives have declined we’ve seen regular marijuana use increase.  In 2005, 5.9% of the adult population (18+) used marijuana monthly, a total of over 12.8 million regular users.  By 2009 the percentage had reached 6.6% and nearly 15 million adults.  So two million more marijuana users but 12,000 fewer marijuana positives?  Sounds like we’re either getting better at beating pee tests or just not taking pee tests.

Meanwhile, oxycodone positives have increased 96% for all urine testing, although these tests are administered about one tenth as often (280,000) for oxycodone as for cannabis (2,400,000).  This despite the facts that while marijuana metabolites may be detected in urine for weeks, oxycodone metabolites are flushed from one’s system in two or three days.  Furthermore, random positives for oxycodone (1.20%) are almost twice as great and post-accident positives for oxycodone (1.80%) are nearly three-times greater than pre-employment positives for oxycodone (0.65%), which suggests to me that the pre-employment screens don’t work very well at keeping oxycodone users out of the workplace.

I’d like to have some data on the breakdown of marijuana positives and I’d like to know how people’s legit prescriptions for oxycodone affect this data.

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Just another day at the office

So, what’s your dream job?  Maybe a job with no drug tests?  Or a job where you handle marijuana all day and you get to toke up on your break?  Well, maybe this web site will help you find that perfect job.

(PRWEB) THCjobs.com is the first job board specifically designed for the medical marijuana industry. As more and more states pass medical marijuana laws, new companies are coming in and creating jobs. People are currently looking for these positions, but are having a hard time finding where they are located online.

The site’s founder, Greg Olson, wanted to eliminate this problem. Olson is quoted, “There are a lot of people who are out work right now and this one of the few areas of the economy that is growing. No pun intended. There are a lot of companies who are looking to hire people, but there was not a single site devoted to employment in this industry. We wanted to create a platform where employers and prospective employees could connect. I think our company mission, which is to connect passionate and talented people with companies and organizations in the marijuana industry, really drives that point home. To many people the marijuana jobs that are listed on our site are their dream jobs”.

The layout of the website is very simple. You probably could not tell a difference in it from other job sites until you look at the jobs posted. There are currently budtender jobs, receptionist positions at medical marijuana dispensaries, and sales positions from companies who design products for the marijuana industry. THCjobs is also using social networking sites like twitter and facebook in order to let people know about any new job opportunities.

The site is free to use by both employers and job seekers. Starting on March 1st, 2011 the site will give companies the option to feature their jobs for $25. Olson said, “This is an extremely fair model. We are actually less interested in money than we are getting people back to work”.

Senator Mark Leno in California has introduced a bill to protect patient’s right to work:

(HIGH TIMES) This week state senator Mark Leno has introduced a bill that he hopes will provide some measure of protection for medical marijuana users. The bill would prohibit employers from firing medical marijuana patients for consuming pot – as long as they’re not consuming pot while on the job.

Former Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill, also introduced by Leno, in 2007.

According to Leno, “The bill simply establishes a medical cannabis patient’s right to work … It astounds me that there would be any controversy around it.”

The bill would not protect employees with “safety sensitive jobs,” such as doctors, nurses, drivers and people who operate heavy machinery. Additionally, the bill would not permit patients to get high during work hours – should the bill pass, employers would retain the right to fire workers for being high on the job.

A medical marijuana employee's gift from his employer... courtesy of David Evans

These kinds of fixes to existing medical marijuana laws are important because there are companies blatantly discriminating against cannabis patients.  There also exists an organization dedicated to not only preserving this discrimination, but teaching you as an employer how to get away with this discrimination.  Because the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association has only our society’s best interests and not their sales of pee tests at heart, you can now attend a seminar in how to properly put a sick and disabled person out of work and on the streets!

(OH&S) The Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association will begin its 2011 webinars on Feb. 9 with a presentation that will be of interest to safety managers and CEOs from Maine to Hawaii. Those two are among 15 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have medical marijuana laws in force. The Feb. 9 webinar by lawyer David G. Evans is titled “State Medical Marijuana Laws: The Potholes in the Road for Drug Free Workplace Programs.”

“Potholes”.  Get it?  The pot pun headline is just too irresistible for a prohibitionist.

So what will you learn in this live webcast that only costs you $49 to view?  According to the DATIA website:

Medical marijuana laws are becoming more common – currently 15 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws. While marijuana is still a federally banned drug per the Controlled Substances Act, these state laws are increasingly wreaking havoc for drug free workplace programs. What, if any, changes do employers need to make to their policies to address medical marijuana? What, if any, actions can employers take against employees with medical marijuana cards that test positive for marijuana? These and many more questions regarding medical marijuana and its effect on drug free workplace programs will be answered in the timely presentation.

Here’s the “havoc” being wreaked: When a medical marijuana patient has a job, it destroys any rationale for pee testing a healthy person for pot to get and keep a job. How do you justify firing Bobby Bonghitter for peeing dirty after a weekend party while not firing Petey Patient for peeing dirty for his glaucoma treatment?  As the Supreme Court told us, marijuana is fungible, so Bobby’s and Petey’s marijuana is the same marijuana.  Why is Bobby a danger and Petey is not?

The fact is neither Bobby nor Petey are a danger to the workplace.  Nobody can ever show us data showing cannabis consumers to be any workplace safety threat.  In Oregon when we challenged the business industry lobbyists, even they admitted they could not point to a single incident where safety risk, injury, or death was demonstrated concerning an employed medical marijuana patient based on their offsite, off-hours use of cannabis.

People like David Evans and DATIA, however, are more than willing to see all patients unjustly denied a right to work than to give up the cash cow of workplace pee tests for healthy people.  Because they are well aware of the fact that far more people use cannabis and it is detectable far longer than all the other illicit drugs combined.  Drug testing for all drugs other than cannabis would result in very few positive results, so few that it would be hard to justify its expense to any company.

In case the name David Evans sounds familiar, it’s because he is the director of the Drug Free America Foundation (motto: “Drug companies Free from competition with cannabis in America Foundation”).  You may remember him from these debates featured on CBS News between Evans and Judge James P. Gray.  Or from this appearance on CNN.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Seems like the harder we work, the more often we smoke pot. Explain that "amotivational syndrome" to us again?

According to the latest National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, 10% of Americans working 31-to-50 hours per week have consumed cannabis over the past thirty days.  Over half of those (51%) will use cannabis more ten days per month and over one quarter (26%) will use cannabis almost every day.

The survey also indicated that among people working 30 or less hours per week who use cannabis, more used cannabis over the past thirty days than those working full time. Fifteen percent of those working 21-30 hours and 13% of those working 20 or less hours per week will consume cannabis.  However, their use rates are lower than the full time employed, with the majority (52% and 59%, respectively) using 10 or fewer days per month.  Only a little more than one fifth (21%) of these workers will use near daily.

Among those who work 51 or more hours per week, only about one in thirteen (7.65%) used cannabis in the past month.  However, that group also showed the most frequent rate by those who did use cannabis, with almost 30% using cannabis nearly every day.

There can be all manner of explanations for these data.  Employed people are more likely to be able to afford the marijuana they smoke more often.  People working longer hours may have less energy for other recreational activities.  One thing you can’t say, though, is that more marijuana use is leading to less productivity.

(Seattle P-I) The case before the court involves a woman suing her former employer, after she failed a drug test and was fired from a customer-service job in Bremerton. The woman, using “Jane Roe” as a pseudonym in court records, was using marijuana prescribed by her doctor for debilitating migraines.

But in petitioning the high court for review, the woman’s attorney argued that the law — passed by voters in 1998 as Initiative 682 — allowed for broader protections. Michael Subit wrote that voters and lawmakers who enacted the Medical Use of Marijuana Act would be “flabbergasted if qualified patients could lose their jobs simply for using medical marijuana at home in accordance with the Act.”

Subit’s client had been hired in 2006 by Colorardo-based TeleTech Customer Care Management to do customer service via phone and emails at a Bremerton office. The company had a drug-test policy; the woman said she would fail it and offered to provide medical documentation for her marijuana use.

She took the test, started work, and was fired about a week later, because she tested positive for cannabis.

This is case law that has been settled on the rest of the West Coast – California’s Ragingwire and Oregon’s Columbia Forest Products cases have decided that the medical marijuana laws in those states do not protect the right of workers using medical marijuana to be gainfully employed. Since the laws say employers do not need to accommodate the medical use of marijuana, they do not need to, even if that use takes place off-hours, off-site, and has no bearing on their fitness for work the next day.

Michigan still has a pending Supreme Court case for a medical marijuana patient fired from work at a Wal-Mart. However, Michigan’s law provides for stronger employment protections than Washington’s law. Arizona, the newest medical marijuana state, provides explicit protections for workers by stating that a positive test for marijuana metabolites alone are not sufficient cause for discriminating against patients in the workplace. These types of protections are being added to the newest bills an initiatives being considered in other states, for, indeed, nobody expected medical marijuana patients to be forced to choose between health care and employment.

Unfortunately, Washington, Oregon, and California, having been the first medical marijuana states, are stuck with laws that hadn’t anticipated this conflict between medicine and employment. Let’s hope the Washington decision favors the patients and that activists in medical marijuana continue to push for recognition of employment, transplant, child custody, and driving rights for medical marijuana patients.

The city of Great Falls, Montana is taking a hard line against workers in the city who also happen to be medical marijuana users. The city has a Drug-Free Workplace Act from 1998 that currently does not include marijuana.

View post:
Great Falls, Montana Takes a Stand Against Housing and Jobs for Medical Marijuana Patients

The big guns are starting to come out regarding California’s Prop 19.  The California Chamber of Commerce (motto: “Pot Smokers Should Collect Welfare and Be Homeless”) has released its legal interpretation of the Act and literally warns:

Imagine a workplace where employees show up to work high on marijuana and there is nothing you can do about it. That’s what employers can look forward to if Proposition 19 passes.

Gee, that sounds almost as terrifying as people showing up to work using their Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, or Darvocet prescriptions, doesn’t it?  Never mind the fact that right there in Prop 19 it says:

The existing right of an employer to address consumption that actually impairs job performance by an employee shall not be affected.

So how is it that someone shows up to work high and the boss says, “OK, go right ahead and drive the forklift!”  Let’s put aside for a moment that California is an “at will” employment state, meaning the employer can fire the employee at will for any reason.  The answer, of course, is to test the worker for actual impairment.

The whole basis for workplace drug testing is the idea that someone would be high on the job and that would impair their performance to the point of causing a workplace safety issue.  The problem is that all sorts of things impair an employee, like drowsiness from prescription drugs, fatigue from overwork, distraction due to injury pain, and lack of sleep.  Drug testing doesn’t catch those impairments and most often catch employees who have used cannabis away from work days or weeks before when it couldn’t possibly impair workplace performance.

CalChamber continues the scaremongering:

Effect of Proposition 19: Because the current anti-smoking law only applies to tobacco products, the proposition would not prohibit employees from smoking marijuana in the workplace. In fact, employers would be required to allow marijuana smoking at work because Proposition 19 would prohibit denial of “any right or privilege” granted by the Act, without defining what that means.

Except for the fact that smoking tobacco in the workplace is not “consumption that actually impairs job performance”.

Effect of Proposition 19: Employers could not meet the requirements of the [Drug Free Workplace Act] because the proposition prohibits them from denying “any right or privilege” or discriminating against anyone for marijuana use. Statewide, affected employers could lose millions of dollars in federal funding.

Remember how the federal government pulled all those million of dollars of federal funding when California passed Proposition 215?  You must remember, right, because CalChamber and other opponents in 1996 had the same dire prediction: California voting for medical marijuana will cause the state to lose federal contracts!

Oh, right, that never happened.  Fourteen years of medical marijuana, billions in bought and sold medicine in dispensaries, dozens of DEA raids later, and yet not one contract, grant, or bit of funding has been pulled by the federal government to California.

Effect of Proposition 19: Employers would be prohibited from discriminating against marijuana users by taking marijuana use into account when deciding whether to hire an applicant.

They’re not even coy about their intent: They want to specifically discriminate against you.  It has nothing to do with fears of impaired workers or lost federal contracts – it’s that they believe your marijuana use makes you a bad person deserving of unemployment and homelessness.

Effect of Proposition 19: Proposition 19 would allow marijuana users to claim that an employer’s actions are motivated by marijuana use. Just as with the FEHA, employers would be required to prove the employee’s poor performance, and not marijuana use, justified the personnel action.

So you have a bad employee.  You fire said employee.  Employee claims you’re discriminating against him because he smokes pot.  You show proof of that employee’s performance.  And the problem is?… you can’t just fire people for being pot smokers!

There is a whole lot in CalChamber’s screed about “actual impairment” that defies logic…

…an employer could not take any disciplinary action against an employee even if allowed to test, until the marijuana use “actually impaired” the employee’s performance—for example, by causing a workplace accident.

…or at least defies understanding of verb tense.  Prop 19 doesn’t say the employer can only discipline “users who are actually impaired“, it says it can discipline “consumption that actually impairs“.  If wrecking the forklift is the only way you can determine whether someone is impaired, your workplace has bigger safety problems than people who might have smoked pot the night before.

Effect of Proposition 19: Because an employer would only be permitted to act if an employee’s marijuana use “actually impairs” job performance, an employer’s hands would be tied to take any action based on the perception that an employee’s marijuana use is a potential threat in the workplace.

Right!  You can’t just discriminate against people based on your “perceptions”, whether you falsely perceive that blacks can’t be trusted, Jews are going to hell, disabled people are a pain to accommodate, or cannabis consumers are a constant workplace threat.

If your employee shows up reeking of pot, eyes bloodshot, and you suspect his pot use is actually impairing, you just have to prove it, that’s all.  There are loads of peer-reviewed, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies that opponents of cannabis (like you) constantly cite to back up the need for workplace urinalysis.  You tell us we have to pee test because these studies show recent cannabis use impairs people.

So how do these studies fail to demonstrate that recent use of marijuana is “a potential threat” and that it “actually impairs”?  You can’t have it both ways!  You can’t use these studies to support pee testing, then conveniently ignore them to say there’s no way to show marijuana use impairs people.

Effect of Proposition 19: Although Proposition 19 specifically “shall not be construed to affect, limit or amend any statute that forbids impairment while engaging in dangerous activities such as driving,” the proposition does not address conduct before driving. According to Proposition 19, unless an employee is “actually impaired,” the employer can not do anything to prevent marijuana use before an employee drives.

See the impairment paragraphs above, but also consider that first part, where Prop 19 doesn’t get rid of any DUID laws.  If your blazed employee is about to take out the company car, test him for impairment!  There are tests for this that will catch not only the stoned driver, but the guy who had a beer at lunch, the guy who’s on anti-histamines that make him drowsy, the guy distracted by his wife’s affair and pending divorce, the guy who stayed up all night last night playing World of Warcraft, and so forth.

But see, that’s the problem: testing for actual impairment would catch many of the people businesses are currently allowing to operate forklifts and drive company cars and trucks.  It would show people once and for all that pee testing hasn’t done anything to make us safer.  It would embarrass the companies that use drug testing when their most impaired employees are never caught.

It might also catch the boss after a two-martini lunch.

Don’t believe the lies from the California Chamber of Commerce.  They represent businesses that are significantly invested, in time and reputation, in using drug testing to discriminate against cannabis consumers, to break union protections, and to fire good people for no good reason.  They are terrified that their urinary tool of oppression is about to go the way of the “NO IRISH NEED APPLY” sign into the dustbin of history.

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Hemp Headlines

1. Arizona passes bill to tax medical marijuana if it becomes legal; sales tax of 5.6% and a $20 ounce luxury tax!
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Cultivator’s Corner with High Times’ Sr. Cultivation Editor Danny Danko

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