There’s now validation to all of us who have sworn, time and time again, that using cannabis doesn’t increase work injuries. It’s all there in black and white, in data recently published in the journal Occupational Medicine.
Apparently, age and gender are factors in higher workplace injury risk, though; if you’re male and under 39 years old, you’re up. This demographic has been associated with a higher risk of injury on the job.
Maine and Nevada have already enacted laws that prohibit certain employers from discriminating on hiring due to a positive cannabis test on a pre-employment drug screen. Lawmakers in other areas of the United States have enacted legislation that limits the use of pre-employment cannabis-specific drug screening. This includes New York City, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
NORML commented on the study’s finding and acknowledged that as attitudes and legality involving cannabis continues to evolve, so should employer attitudes about what their employees do off the clock, especially now that data has granted cannabis a reprieve.
Researchers involved in a study that delved into the correlation between “past year” cannabis use and work-related injuries sampled over 136,500 workers in Canada. This isn’t news to those that have followed earlier studies, all indicating that workers that use cannabis when off duty have no more injuries than workers that don’t use cannabis at all.
The authors of the study concluded: “To the best of our knowledge, this was the largest population-based cross-sectional study examining the association between past-year cannabis use and work-related injuries. … We found that workers reporting using cannabis more than once in the past year were no more likely to report having experienced a work-related injury over the same time period in a large cohort of the Canadian working population.”
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