As we anticipated, a number of bills were introduced to allow employers to terminate an employee who is a medical marijuana cardholder without any evidence of actual impairment on the job. The ACLU opposed HB 2497, HB 2881 and HB 3052 (and had concerns about HB 2503) because in one form or another the bills included this type of power for employers.
The Oregon Medical Marijuana Act permits use of marijuana to ease the symptoms of some debilitating medical conditions. Many patients who use marijuana to control their symptoms—such as muscle spasms by patients with multiple sclerosis—are able to get relief from their symptoms, and continue to work, without the harmful side effects of the available prescription medications.
A person who is actually impaired at work can already be sanctioned, no matter whether the impairment is caused by lawful or unlawful drugs, alcohol or many other reasons. Employers who have employees that operate high-risk equipment should use performance tests each day to determine if employees can operate machinery safely. But using urinalysis drug tests to detect the presence of drug residue does not determine if employees are impaired at the time of the test and also take days to get reliable results. In addition, the commonly used urine tests can detect residual metabolites of marijuana ingested more than 30 days earlier, which means most, if not all, medical marijuana patients would come up positive.
The House Business and Labor Committee held a public hearing on these proposals. While there were attempts to move some form of one of the bills forward, ultimately all the proposals died in committee until a motion was made on the House floor late in the session to withdraw HB 3052 from committee for immediate consideration. That motion failed on a 29-29 vote.
WIN: HB 3052 FAILED ON HOUSE FLOOR; OTHERS DIED IN COMMITTEE
House Vote: 29-29
*Scorecard Vote
