“How to Get Ready for Cannabis in the Workplace” Interview. Dr. David Frederick Hepburn

On Wed March 14 Dr. David Frederick Hepburn spoke at the CMHA Bottom Line conference in Vancouver BC on “How to Get Ready for Cannabis in the Workplace.”

Dr. Hepburn began by outlining the importance of taking ten minutes to read about the basic structure of the Endocannabinoid system in order to understand that the entire purpose of medical cannabis is to harness the ECS, bending it to our will to help treat specific conditions. “Without understanding what the ECS does in our body, you cannot begin to understand how medical cannabis is medicine.”

Dr. David Hepburn pointed out that for an employee who is a legitimate qualified medical cannabis patient, employers are bound by the duty to accommodate in the Human Rights Code. By law, this means patients with medical marijuana prescriptions must be accommodated just like any other medical need or disability. Medical cannabis is joined by a multitude of other prescription medications which may also require accommodation, certainly in safety sensitive situations where no level on impairment is acceptable.

Dr. David Hepburn also commented that this could mean allowing patients adequate breaks to step outside and vaporize their medicine, or a change in their duties and responsibilities to accommodate their medical condition, but the law confirms that the role of the employer is to accommodate the employee’s needs, not their preference.

It’s also important for employers to understand that many cannabinoids cause no psychoactivity (CBD being the most popular of these) and hence patients will have no impairment whatsoever.

Dr. Hepburn stressed the importance of understanding that the medical cannabis employee situation is more cut and dried than some of the possible scenarios that could arise from pending legalization of recreational cannabis in a few months.

Dr. Hepburn was very direct in clarifying that the entire purpose of using recreational cannabis is to obtain an altered mental state,  not something desired on a construction site or in air traffic control stations. There is no ‘right’ to impairment. While that is true for alcohol or recreational cannabis, the similarities stop there. While a blood level of alcohol can correlate to impairment the same is not true for cannabis. Someone could be quite impaired with cannabis and yet have very little in the blood or urine.

Finally Dr. David Frederick Hepburn commented that others may demonstrate no impairment whatsoever and yet have a positive test result for cannabis taken a week earlier. So random drug testing is not going to play a big role in the scientifically valid methods of determining impairment. As such, specific impairment testing algorithms need to be explored as a more accurate measure of providing safety in the workplace while at the same time respecting the individual’s rights.