While federal workplace safety standards don’t yet exist for the cannabis industry, state and federal regulators are paying closer attention to the industry and its workers’ needs than ever before.
On Tuesday, the Board of Certified Safety Professionals hosted a webinar called “OSHA Enforcement and Guidance on Protecting Workers within the Cannabis Industry.” Speakers included Yasmine Daniels, an industrial hygienist with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and Virginia Weaver, a medical officer at OSHA.
While OSHA doesn’t have a cannabis-specific standard for workplace safety, the presentation covered areas like agriculture, tobacco, and grain that could have transferable practices. Some state programs, like the Michigan OSHA, have already started to produce cannabis-specific guides and resources.
Daniels said that she thinks about potential hazards for cannabis workers in three buckets: growers, who could be exposed to biological elements, like mold, or chemicals like pesticides; processors, who could be exposed to flammable solvents or indoor air quality issues; and retailers, who could be exposed to allergens and “even workplace violence,” Daniels said.
On enforcement, Daniels said that over the past decade, OSHA has issued 106 violations for cannabis-related issues. The violations included areas like respiratory protection, hazard communication, and personal protective equipment.
Daniels gave an overview of three evaluations since 2017 that have given OSHA “context for how we can begin to frame our thinking around the types of hazards within this industry, as well as how the hazards are tied to the individual processes within the industry.”
In 2017, for example, NIOSH evaluated workers in outdoor cannabis farms that harvested and processed cannabis. In 2019, NIOSH focused on indoor and outdoor grow operations where cannabis was harvested and processed. And in 2022, NIOSH evaluated indoor cultivation facilities where cannabis harvesting and trimming occurred.
“A common theme across all of those HHEs, or health hazard evaluations, is that employees were often exposed to tetrahydrocannabinol, which we know is THC, that was present along surfaces throughout some of the facilities,” Daniels said. “Employees were also found to be exposed to airborne concentrations of endotoxins, which are polysaccharide and lipoprotein complexes that can be released by the outer cell walls of gram negative bacteria and cause adverse respiratory effects such as chronic bronchitis and asthma.”
Weaver focused on an unprecedented 2022 incident,, and subsequent inspection, related to a 27-year-old who worked as a flower production tech at a cannabis facility in Massachusetts. The worker experienced a cardiac arrest and later died. This, Weaver said, was, to their knowledge, the “first fatality from occupational asthma in the U.S. cannabis industry.” The Massachusetts Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) Program, a partnership between the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), produced a report after the incident.
An OSHA interview with the employee’s mother found that the employee never had breathing issues until she started having issues like a cough and nasal congestion while at work. These symptoms, her mother said, would resolve once her daughter was off work. Two months before the asthma attack that led to the cardiac arrest, the worker’s mother said that EMS took her to the hospital due to shortness of breath; she was prescribed an inhaler.
“When we reviewed the records, she herself said she did not have a history of asthma, but she thought she might be allergic to something at work because she had a cough and runny nose for over a month,” Weaver said. “She was prescribed the usual treatments for asthma at the workplace. There were a number of efforts made to try and reduce her exposure, although none were successful.”
Weaver described, broadly, what happened next: an investigation that included meetings with colleagues at NIOSH, both in respiratory and health hazard divisions, reviews of medical records, coworker interviews, air sampling, and a facility walkthrough.
“The magnitude of exposures in the occupational setting is way, way more than in the recreational setting,” Weaver said. “There are some who think that because a number of cannabis employees may also use this product recreationally, that they couldn’t possibly develop any work-related symptoms from it. And that’s in fact not the case.”
How can cannabis employers prevent another case like this happening?
“The most important thing is involvement from the industry to train workers and managers to identify and report symptoms of occupational allergy,” Weaver said, adding that workers experiencing these symptoms will often need a referral to a specialist. Some might need a complete job transfer for removal from that type of work.
“Allergy often can only be resolved by stopping the exposure completely, so the health care provider needs to be aware of that and needs to understand about reasonable accommodation and worker’s compensation,” Weaver said.
And, like so many areas of cannabis policy, Weaver said “we need research.”
“We need to know which exposures and job titles are the highest risk for these respiratory outcomes, because you can’t prevent what you aren’t able to identify is high-risk,” Weaver said.
