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The Legalization of Cannabis & its Impact on Your Safety Culture

Fri, 12/01/2017

Are You Adequately Prepared to Address the Potentially Competing Workplace Obligations?

The discussion is a lengthy one when listing the ways in which the legalization of cannabis will impact your workplace Safety Culture. However, one of the more interesting and important topics to consider is how the planned legalization in 2018 will create circumstances that may contradict one another without adequate preparation in your workplace.

The legalization of cannabis has two potentially competing obligations:

  • Employers have a duty to accommodate employees with disabilities.
  • Employers must also take every reasonable precaution to ensure the safety of their workplace.

Accommodation for medical marijuana can begin by mirroring the practices developed for accommodating any employee who has authorized medications that have the potential to impact or impair their work, or pose a safety risk to themselves or others. Remember, addiction is a disability that may require accommodation.

Employees must:

  • Be aware of their roles and responsibilities under fitness for duty and drug & alcohol policies.
  • Follow the Internal Responsibility System (IRS), including self-disclosure and reporting fellow workers where impairment is reasonably suspected.
  • Cooperate in the accommodation process.

In summary, balance accommodation with safety and privacy obligations.

This discussion is just one of several topics addressed in the Safety Culture: Marijuana & the Workplace Online Course.

For more information, please visit www.worksafestaysafe.com.

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