Politics
Federal Officials Discuss New OSHA Program On Marijuana Industry Workplace Hazards
Federal officials from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) on Tuesday discussed a new program aimed at identifying and addressing workplace hazards in Colorado’s legal cannabis industry, part of an effort to reduce the risk of occupational injury, illness and death at marijuana businesses.
Colorado’s marijuana industry has already seen three workplace fatalities in the past seven years, Meredith Post, a compliance assistance specialist in OSHA’s Denver office, said on a webinar about the new program—although the incidents were “not necessarily related to the actual process of manufacturing the cannabis,” she clarified.
Meanwhile, compliance officers have conducted nearly four dozen site inspections within the state-legal industry and found hazards such as lack of respiratory protection and personal protective equipment, electrical risks, improper handling and storage of flammable liquids, slip-and-fall dangers and others.
Post said at Wednesday’s meeting that while the federal agency has been inspecting state-licensed marijuana businesses since legalization began, the goal of the new Local Emphasis Program for Cannabis Industries is aimed at curbing a growing number of workplace incidents around marijuana production and processing.
“Inspecting the cannabis industry is not new to us,” she said. “We’ve just decided to do an emphasis program to get into more places and be proactive on some of these injuries and illnesses that we’re starting to see, not only in Colorado, but nationwide.”
She added that in the one cannabis-related fatality incident she personally investigated, the death occurred after a worker fell from a platform that wasn’t adequately guarded.
Unlike many areas where federal prohibition from marijuana conflicts with state-legal industries, Post said in response to a question from Marijuana Moment, rescheduling or legalizing marijuana likely wouldn’t significantly change OSHA’s oversight.
“If or when it does become federally legal, it will not affect how we’re operating in regards to inspecting these facilities,” the OSHA official said, but added that “we’ve been told by all of our higher-ups in the national offices [that] it is still federally illegal.”
The webinar is the latest outreach from OSHA officials in Colorado as part of the agency’s new local emphasis program, announced last month. The aim is “to encourage employers to take steps to address hazards, ensure facilities are evaluated to determine if they are in [compliance] with all relevant OSHA requirements, and to help them correct hazards, thereby reducing potential injuries, illnesses, and death for their workers,” according to an executive summary of the campaign.
A report on the new Local Emphasis Program for Cannabis Industries is expected to be issued sometime around early 2027—as well as at the end of the program, in 2029.
As part of the initiative, OSHA compliance experts at the agency’s Denver and Englewood Area Offices will visit cannabis producers and processors, where they’ll conduct consultations, employee interviews and site walkthroughs, Post explained. Retail establishments are not included in the new program.
While inspections could have begun as soon as October 19, Post said neither of the two area offices had started inspections as of Wednesday. “We’re still working through that process,” she said. Officials have been taking lists “from the state licensing websites and looking at who has a license and what license they hold,” she added.
While OSHA is currently operating under a continuing resolution in terms of federal funding, Post said that a future budget would hopefully allow the offices to hire more compliance officers to help handle the inspection workload.
Going forward, OSHA officials in Colorado also plan to host a formal meeting on “the actual hazards we’re seeing across the United States,” Post said, “and maybe doing a few case studies from other areas that have had significant inspections in the cannabis industry.”
Following the new Colorado program’s announcement, OSHA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Labor, sent letters to some of Colorado’s state-regulated cannabis companies offering free workplace evaluations services to small and midsize businesses designed to identify possible dangers and encourage employers to address them. Establishments that have 250 or fewer employees qualify for the free consultations.
The letter notes that the cannabis industry “presents a number of hazards to workers employed in this occupation,” including exposure to fire and explosion risks, electrical hazards, volatile chemicals, heavy machinery and airborne irritants like dusts and molds.
After an OSHA evaluation, the business is required to fix any compliance issues or it could face steep financial penalties. Major violations can carry fines of up to about $16,000, Post said at Wednesday’s webinar, while willful or repeated violations can cost more than $160,000. Failure to abate workplace hazards could carry penalties of up to about $16,000 per day.
In response to audience members on the webinar pointing out that those penalties were listed as maximum penalties, Post noted that OSHA area directors have discretion to seek lower penalties based on matters such as a company’s size or its establishment of a robust health and safety program.
Two OSHA officials spoke earlier this year at an event about protecting workers in the cannabis industry, an issue prompted in part by the 2022 death of an employee of the multi-state cannabis operator Trulieve who collapsed at work and died—what one OSHA official described at the event as “the first fatality from occupational asthma in the U.S. cannabis industry.”
Though marijuana is still illegal under federal law, OSHA’s federal and state plans around health and safety standards are nevertheless “applicable to employers engaged in commercial cannabis,” the officials pointed out at the time.
That effort to protect cannabis industry workers comes not only through federal guidance but also OSHA-approved state plans in 29 jurisdictions, most of which apply to both public and private employees.
OSHA described the new Denver- and Englewood-area campaign variously as a “local emphasis program” (LEP) and “regional emphasis program,” as it applies only in the jurisdictions of those two offices.
“The goal of this LEP,” the agency said, “is to identify and reduce or eliminate workplace incidences of health and physical hazards associated with cannabis processing, growing, cultivation and product manufacturing which are causing or likely to cause serious health or physical injury or death.”
On the outreach side, “activities will include training sessions with stakeholders and electronic information sharing activities through newsletters,” OSHA explained in the regional instruction, which took effect in July of this year and will remain in place into July 2029. “Enforcement activities will include, but not be limited to, the inspection and review of cannabis processing, growing, cultivation and product manufacturing activities, including the evaluation of working conditions, records, and safety and health programs to identify and obtain corrections of workplace hazards at applicable inspection sites.”
The agency’s regional guidance cites a 2017 survey of 214 workers in Colorado’s cannabis industry that found “that only 15% of workers received continuous, structured safety and health training and 23% of workers never received any safety or health training.”
At the event in April on workplace safety in the cannabis industry, OSHA doctor and medical officer Virginia Weaver said that better detection protocols at workplaces, referrals to appropriate specialists and robust research into cannabis-related risks are essential to improve health and safety in the industry.
“Importantly, we need research, because we need to know which exposures and job titles are the highest risk for these respiratory outcomes,” she said. “Because you can’t prevent what you aren’t able to identify.”
Separately, an OSHA official said last year that the federal government’s ongoing prohibition of marijuana makes the agency’s job “complicated” when it comes to ensuring the safety of workers in the cannabis industry.
Andrew Levinson, director of OSHA’s Directorate of Standards and Guidance, said at a late-May meeting of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NACOSH) that “the cannabis industry is a little bit complicated for federal agencies because cannabis is still illegal at the federal level.”
“So there’s kind of state activity going on. We still go out and deal with those issues, but the policy issues there are complicated,” he said, adding at the time that he wasn’t sure if there had been workplace fatalities in the marijuana sector.
As for the Massachusetts cannabis worker who died after collapsing at a facility operated by the multistate operator Trulieve, the company paid OSHA $14,502 to settle the case, also agreeing to conduct a study to “determine whether ground cannabis dust is required to be classified as a ‘hazardous chemical’ in the occupational setting,” according to a press release at the time.
At last year’s NACOSH meeting Levinson acknowledged the Massachusetts death and said that “we still go out when OSHA would normally go out, but from a policy perspective, the way that we develop materials for specific industries is a little bit complicated by the legal issues.”
In June of last year, the leader of one of the country’s largest labor unions called on President Joe Biden to end federal marijuana prohibition and urged the president to allow OSHA to “immediately start work on a national workplace safety standard for legal cannabis business, using the regulations set by California as a model.”
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
