A Colorado lawmaker wants the state to take a hard look at how workplace drug policies affect — and in some cases discriminate against — cannabis users.
Rep. Edie Hooton, a Boulder Democrat, is particularly interested in the dilemma facing people who use cannabis to treat ailments like epilepsy, nausea and arthritis.
“You’ve got a huge group of people in Colorado choosing to use medical cannabis instead of pharmaceutical drugs,” Hooton said, adding that it’s time for the state to start “recognizing there’s a whole class of Coloradans who are excluded from employment simply, solely because they use medical cannabis. It’s not fair to them and it does deprive employers from potentially really great employees.”
Initially this legislative session, Hooton proposed a bill that would have protected employees from being denied employment, or fired from an existing job, for legal, off-the-clock cannabis use. Hooton is scrapping that plan entirely and starting fresh with a bill that would force the state to overhaul its approach to marijuana in the workplace.
Rather than set out new rules in her bill, she’ll offer legislation that gives the authority to a task force of experts with a wide range of backgrounds. That task force would make recommendations that the state Department of Labor and Employment would use as the basis of new state law.
What she hopes comes out of this, she said, is “a near-term way to knowingly employ people who are medical cannabis users to protect their legal rights.”
She added, “Right now they’re discriminated against, and at the same time we want to protect the prerogative of the employers, who have every right to have a safe work environment with highly productive employees.”
The task force she seeks would have both business leaders and recommending physicians experienced with cannabis, among others. Hooton said that any state law changes that emerge from the task force’s work would have to be flexible enough to incorporate emerging technologies used to test for cannabis impairment.
Business lobbyists are expected to fight any policy that proposes to disempower employers — but Hooton promised that isn’t her aim. She is sympathetic particularly to employers who hire people to operate heavy machinery.
The cannabis industry, on the other hand, generally agrees with her that this conversation is overdue.
“We of course support any effort that dismantles archaic misguided prohibition policies that date back to a systemically broken system,” said Peter Marcus of the Terrapin Care Station dispensary, who works closely on cannabis policy issues in Colorado. “Workers who consume cannabis deserve the same treatment as someone who drinks alcohol in their time off. You don’t lose most jobs for having a drink off duty, just as you shouldn’t lose one for consuming cannabis responsibly.”
That this bill is coming in 2022, a decade after legalization, is yet another indication of how much homework Colorado left itself when it created a legal cannabis industry here before figuring out so many related details — banking, impairment testing, forgiveness of prior drug offenses, to name a few.
“This is the problem,” Hooton said. “The legislature would not listen to Coloradans about wanting to legalize cannabis. The legislature was locked in, so the people had to take it into their own hands… at the ballot. You can’t be prescriptive in a ballot initiative, so then we’ve had to play catch up.”
Chris Holbert, the Republican Senate minority leader, has often lamented the same.
“We didn’t just legalize, twice. We constitutionalized,” he said. “Some of these questions weren’t answered when that happened. Maybe they couldn’t be.”
Holbert, who lives in Douglas County, said it would behoove employers who still test for cannabis to understand how the game has changed, and that rules meant to protect against workers being high on the job can end up punishing people who use cannabis recreationally off the clock, or who don’t get high from it at all.
Said Hooton, “There is still this stubborn view of cannabis, kind of a ‘reefer madness’ type of view, that if you’re using it you’re frickin’ stoned out of your mind and nodding out and you can’t function well.”
Source: Read Full Article