DON'T MAKE A BAD MARIJUANA LAW WORSE

Ten years ago, when Oregon voters approved the state's landmark
Medical Marijuana Act, they did so with assurances that only a
handful of very ill people needed it -- perhaps 500 a year,
supporters said at the time.

That turned out to be a false promise, as critics warned at the time.
They appear to have correctly predicted that the new law would open
the door for wider use of pot in Oregon by creating new legal
defenses for the possession, use, cultivation and delivery of marijuana.

Statistics strongly suggest this. Today, nearly 16,000 Oregonians
hold patient cards entitling them to use marijuana. Nearly 8,000 hold
"caregiver cards" so they can possess it, and about 4,000 have
permits to grow the plant, resulting in at least 19 tons of marijuana
growing legally at any given time.

Not surprisingly, the rate of marijuana use by adult Oregonians is 50
percent higher than the national rate. Voters in 1998 may have
thought they were showing compassion for a small number of terminally
ill cancer patients who needed marijuana to alleviate their symptoms,
but the law is clearly being abused in a big way.

This abuse is showing up in the workplace, where the Oregon drug test
failure rate is 50 percent higher than the national rate. And the
most prevalent reason for testing failure? Marijuana use -- 71
percent of all positive tests in Oregon, compared with 53 percent nationally.

The 2007 Legislature had a chance to address the workplace issue but
fell short. A bill to make it easier for Oregon employers to enforce
drug-free workplace policies, even against employees with valid
medical marijuana cards, passed in the Senate but faltered in the House.

That was a sensible bill and deserves a second chance in the special
session that begins today. Instead, however, the House Business and
Labor Committee has put forth a much narrower bill that would give
employers the option to regulate medical pot users in only the most
dangerous of jobs.

This is a bad bill that will make Oregon's flawed law worse, not
better. By giving employers discretion on accommodating medical
marijuana use only by workers doing "hazardous duties," the bill
would create a huge uncovered class of workers who would win the
implicit right to accommodation at work -- something the original act
explicitly did not grant.

In other words, this new bill is a Trojan horse. It would exempt such
dangerous jobs as mining, logging and blasting, while creating the
right to special accommodation for everyone else who might have
marijuana cards, including surgeons, bus drivers, nannies and
editorial writers.

Legislators should spike this bill. Instead, they should pass Senate
Bill 465, clarifying the right of employers to enforce drug-free
workplace policies.

And while they're at it, they should fund a Justice Department study
of what increasingly appears to be widespread abuse of a
well-intentioned medical marijuana law gone bad.