Willamette Week | “Working Spliffs”

Willamette Week | “Working Spliffs” | December 10th, 2008

Dan Harmon, vice chairman of Associated Oregon Industries, has been touring the state telling business leaders and policy makers he’ll push the 2009 Legislature to allow employers to fire medical marijuana users—even if they toke only at home.

Harmon says he’s also pushing to require employer notification if a worker has a medical marijuana card.  Currently, 20,547 Oregonians have them.

“Basically, it would allow them to hang up the ‘No Medical Marijuana Patients Need Apply’ sign,” says Russ Belville, associate director of the Oregon chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “They want your boss to become your doctor.”

Harmon, general counsel for Portland-based building giant Hoffman Construction, echoes cops who say the law is widely abused. Harmon also believes medical marijuana poses a danger to workplace safety.

“We have a permissiveness around substance abuse,” Harmon says. “There’s an agenda out there to legalize marijuana, and this can’t be the Trojan horse.”

Oregon law now says employers need not accommodate patients’ marijuana use in the workplace, but it says nothing about home use.

Harmon wants to bring back a bill that’s twice failed to pass the Legislature. That measure would rewrite the law to say employers need not accommodate medical marijuana users “regardless of where the use occurs.” Harmon says the change would leave it up to bosses to decide if a worker’s marijuana use poses a threat, whether they use it on the job or off.

After failing in the 2005 and 2007 legislative sessions, a compromise bill was slated for the 2008 special session. Rep. Peter Buckley (D-Ashland), who authored the compromise, says House leaders spiked it because a Feb. 4 editorial in The Oregonian opposed it, calling instead for employers to be allowed to fire users.

“Working Spliffs”.  Yet another serious headline from the paper that brought you “King Bong”.  What an eloquently respectful way to describe the threat to workplace rights for thousands of chronically ill, disabled, and sense-threatened Oregonians who chose a legal doctor-recommended herbal remedy rather than a factory pharmaceutical.  ”Working Spliffs” – gee, I wonder why we have such trouble getting people to understand this is a simple issue of civil rights: your boss doesn’t get to stock your medicine cabinet and no one should have to choose between health and employment.  What, was “Tokin’ Hires” already taken?

Is it too much to ask WWeek that just once when covering a story about cannabis, that you not use a derogatory pun as your headline?  Or at least apply your cannabis headline standards to other stories?  ”Alcoholics Pack Boozers Festival” might be a good one for a story on the Oregon Brewers Festival!  You could use “Run for your Rack” to describe the Komen Race for the Cure.  Why not open up all popular recreational intoxicants and community health movements to your brand of witty headlines?

And for those who do not use cannabis as medicine and do not support those who do, be mindful of Pastor Neimoller’s poem.  Do you really want to see a precedent set that employers can dictate which medicines you may take?  Is a worker who uses a brain medication like Prozac a “safety risk” on the job?  First they’ve come for the medical marijuana patients… but how long before they come for your choice of medication?

Oregon NORML demands safe workplaces, free from impairment, just as much as Dan Harmon.  Our difference is that Harmon believes mere registration in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program is tantamount to being stoned on the job.  Another difference is that we believe workplaces should be screening for all forms of impairment – fatigue, drowsiness, prescription medication, alcohol use, emotional issues, injury – and that urine screens and medical marijuana cards do not prove impairment.

There are companies that manufacture impairment testing stations that measure a worker’s eye-tracking against his baseline “unimpaired” test.  They are far more accurate in not only detecting impairment due to drugs and alcohol but also for all factors because it measures actual impairment.  Workers prefer it to invasive disgusting urine screens, which for cannabis are notoriously unreliable (data published this October in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology showed that heavy cannabis users can show up positive on urine screens even after 25 days of monitored abstinence from using cannabis!)  A company called PMI tested one such product from 1997-98 and all the testing companies that tried it reported excellent results.  One of those companies was the Portland Police Bureau… so if it is good enough to detect impaired cops with firearms on Portland’s streets, it should be good enough to detect impaired workers with hammers at Hoffman Construction.

But every time we present these impairment tests as a fair and reasonable solution, Harmon and our opponents dismiss it out of hand.  ”Too expensive,” they’ll claim, even though one unit would pay for itself in the savings from not spending the money on a year or two of urine screening, defending lawsuits from employees fired due to faulty urine screening, and retention and recruitment of employees not grossed out by peeing for employment.  ”Won’t work in the workplace,” they’ll wail, even though it worked for the Portland Police Bureau and we can’t see how making an employee leave work to pee in a cup works better than making them stare at a machine for a minute in the break room.

The machines are only a solution if you’re interested in being fair and reasonable and actually protecting Oregon workers and workplaces from impairment-related safety hazards.  If instead your motivation is a “moral crusade” to “do something about the permissiveness in this state”, then writing job discrimination against sick, disabled, and sense-threatened Oregonians into law is the way to go.

Russ Belville

Associate Director

Oregon NORML