Politics
OSHA Offers Free Workplace Evaluations To Colorado Marijuana Businesses As Part Of New Federal Program On Industry Safety
As part of a new federal program looking into workplace hazards in Colorado’s legal cannabis industry, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is offering free consultation services to small and midsize marijuana businesses designed to identify possible dangers and allow employers to address them.
In a new letter to Colorado cannabis businesses, the federal agency says it “will conduct, at your request, a free on-site safety and health evaluation.”
“All employers who avail themselves of this service,” the letter adds, “will be required to abate all serious hazards identified during the consultation visit and to provide the consultation service with verification that these hazards have been abated.”
The visits are part of OSHA’s new Local Emphasis Program for Cannabis Industries, which the agency announced earlier this 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 regional program is expected to be issued sometime around early 2027—as well as at the end of the program, in 2029.
Establishments overseen by OHSA’s Denver and Englewood Area Offices that have 250 or fewer employees qualify for the free workplace evaluations, the new letter says.
While taking advantage of the free OSHA evaluations may force businesses to incur abatement costs, overlooking failures to comply with OSHA guidelines could subject employers citations and financial penalties—and in some cases, put workers’ lives at risk.
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.
OSHA, which is part of the U.S. Department of Labor, said its Denver and Englewood offices “have conducted inspections at multiple Cannabis Industry facilities,” adding that “numerous serious safety and health hazards were discovered, and citations were issued as a result of these inspections.”
As the agency said earlier this month, “Denver and Englewood Area Offices have conducted 44 complaint, fatality, and referral inspections in the past 7 years, as well as several accident investigations including three fatalities at facilities in this industry.”
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.”
Read the full OSHA letter to Colorado cannabis businesses below:
Photo courtesy of Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images.
