MEDICAL MARIJUANA NO THREAT TO SAFETY

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!" cried Chicken Little. "Emergency!
Emergency!" cries Don Harmon (guest opinion, Feb. 17) with just as much
connection with reality. For over three legislative sessions, Harmon has
proclaimed an emergency in the workplace because some workers use marijuana
therapeutically. He wants to fire any such person, no matter when or where
that use occurs. It is a safety issue, he says.

Oregon law says, "Patients and doctors have found marijuana to be an
effective treatment"| and therefore, marijuana should be treated like other
medicines;"|". In most workplaces there are established guidelines for
other medicines and therapeutic marijuana is best treated like them. If
there is an issue of impairment, Oregon law already allows impaired workers
to be removed, no matter the cause.

Still, that is not enough for Harmon. I have watched Harmon testify before
three Legislatures that Oregon needs "Emergency" legislation so employers
can fire therapeutic marijuana users at will. He and a small crew of
ditto-heads speak in alarmed tones about problems caused by those workers.
Yet when Rep. Peter Buckley asked directly how many accidents had ever been
caused by a therapeutic marijuana using workers, the answer after a long
silence was "None." So much for the "Emergency!"

Given the lack of accidents, focusing on therapeutic use of marijuana as a
cause of workplace impairment sees misguided, at best. Yet Harmon claims
that one of the biggest dangers to the workplace is the "well documented"
abuses of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program, abuses which can only be
solved by essentially demolishing the program. He cites the existence of
almost 18,000 registrants as being a problem for employers and evidence of
abuse. But is it?

Since the beginning of the OMMP, opponents have waved the red herring claim
of rampant abuse at every legislative session and media opportunity, citing
everything from the size of some plants to number of patients as proof. But
patient numbers or plant sizes are not evidence of abuse -- convictions are.

Where are these convictions? There should be hundreds a year if abuse was
actually widespread and law enforcement was doing its job. With 18,000
registrants it would take 180 convictions per year to reach an abuse rate
of 1 percent. There may be that many arrests, but the number of cases which
are actually tried is, by observation, far fewer, and convictions fewer
yet. With convictions for violations of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act
apparently at less than 1 percent, there is not rampant fraud and abuse but
rather impressive compliance with the law. No other law can point to that
successful compliance rate.

No one could disagree that any impairment in a workplace is a problem, in
some workplaces dangerously so. So, one would think that Harmon and his
colleagues would be pleased about actual legislation which allows employers
to remove persons from dangerous occupations due their use of a therapeutic
agent which may cause impairment and included therapeutic agents with
proven impairment records as well as therapeutic marijuana. After weeks of
consulting with groups like Associated General Contractors, legislators,
labor unions and OMMP registrants, Rep. Buckley authored such a bill for
the current Legislature which addressed all of the points made by Harmon,
except the arbitrary firing of therapeutic marijuana users. This bill which
by all accounts was aimed at a safer workplace for all workers, and was
supported by employers and workers was summarily rejected by Harmon and his
ditto-heads.

Why? Because workplace safety is not Harmon's goal, but simply his cover.
His actual goal is the disestablishment of the OMMP, the most successful
such program in the United States. One need only to see that his biggest
allies and backers are drug test companies and drug treatment businesses to
recognize the actual plan in play. The biggest problem they face is an
increasing number of workplaces which are giving up drug testing because of
a lack of its relationship to workplace safety and the dissatisfaction it
causes among all employees. Ironically, their problem is that admitted OMMP
registrants have not caused accidents, thus calling into question of the
entire premise of drug testing: that only through costly urinalysis can one
tell who is using drugs.

Any normally intelligent Oregonian supports an impairment-free workplace.
To do otherwise would be foolish. By the same token, any normally
intelligent Oregonian can see through Harmon's ruse and understand his
disingenuousness regarding the nonexistent problem of therapeutic
marijuana-using workers.

A safe workplace? Absolutely yes! Arbitrary discrimination? Absolutely no!

Laird Funk of Williams is one of the authors of the original Oregon Medical
Marijuana Act and vice chairman of the Advisory Committee on Medical
Marijuana, though he writes as a private citizen.