Portland, OR: The Associated Oregon Industries are planning a legislative assault on Oregon’s 10-year-old medical marijuana law, claiming that medical marijuana patients in the workplace are a safety risk. However, data compiled by Oregon NORML, from Oregon state government workman’s compensation and safety records, shows a ten-year decline in workplace safety statistics. The data are published and hyperlinked on the Oregon NORML website.
Harmon, an executive vice president with Hoffman Construction, has been touring the state in his capacity as chair of the Drugfree Workplace Legislative Work Group, giving presentations on their goals for the 2009 biennial legislative session. These goals include re-introducing a bill that died last session that would grant employers the right to fire medical marijuana patients for their off-site, after-hours, legal use of cannabis medicine, as well as allowing employers to refuse to hire any medical marijuana patients—regardless of skill, experience, or a clean safety record.
Hoffman is also touting plans to reduce plant and possession limits, to require patients to first use Marinol before attaining a medical marijuana card; to eliminate medical marijuana clinics by requiring only one’s bona fide doctor is recommending cannabis; and to require the state to notify an employer if an employee applies for a medical marijuana card.
“Oregon’s own state health and safety databases show that Dan Harmon is misleading the people of Oregon,” says Russ Belville, Oregon NORML’s Associate Director, who pulled together data from Oregon’s Occupational Safety & Health Administration, Workman’s Compensation Division, and the federal government’s National Surveys on Drug Use and Health. “During the ten years that the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act has been in place, the program has grown from 500 patients to over 20,000 now. Yet, workplace fatalities, time-off injuries, non-time-off injuries, DUIDs, and citations for serious OSHA workplace safety violations have all declined in the same ten years.”
“Now that doesn’t mean medical marijuana patients made the workplaces any safer,” Belville concludes, “but if they made the workplace increasingly more dangerous, that’s not showing up in these data. Harmon is offering up job discrimination against the disabled as a poor solution in search of a non-existent problem.”
In 1998, after Measure 67 (the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act) was approved by voters, there were 3.3 workplace fatalities per 100,000 workers. There were also 3.5 non-fatal injuries, requiring no time off, and 3.4 non-fatal injuries requiring no time off. By 2006, those figures had dropped to 2.1, 2.4, and 2.8, respectively. There were 4,446 citations of serious OSHA violations in 1998; in 2005 the number was 4,309. DUI citations, crashes, and fatalities per 1,000 Oregonians dropped from 7.5, 6.5, and 0.16 to 7.0, 5.5, and 0.11, respectively, from 1998 to 2006.
The data, however, may be irrelevant to Harmon. While he cites workplace safety and legal liability as factors in discriminating against medical marijuana patients in the workplace, he and other business leaders in testimony before a House committee in 2007 could not cite one instance where a patient’s legal off-site, after-hours use of medical cannabis contributed to any workplace safety incident. Revealing his true intentions, Hoffman was quoted in the Albany Democrat-Herald calling his work a “moral crusade” and that acceptance of medical marijuana “says something about permissiveness in this state, and we’ve got to stop this permissiveness.”
For more information, please contact Madeline Martinez, Oregon NORML Executive Director, at (503) 239-6110, or Russ Belville, Oregon NORML Associate Director, at (503) 349-0395. Tables and charts of the data from official Oregon and federal databases appears on the “Data” page at Oregon NORML’s website, http://ornorml.org/data.