This week in our short news segment the state of LA had 3 subcommittee task forces convene to discuss workplace protections with medical cannabis users in the state. The CBP lost another federal lawsuit on it’s attempts to ban the imports of paraphernalia to legal states. Player included below for those on the go.
This week in cannabis news our neighbors in Louisiana had their Employment and Medical Marijuana Task Force convened to tackle workplace medical marijuana concerns.
The issue has come up as the state passed a bill into law in the 2022 summer that prohibits government employers from firing medical cannabis patients for failing a THC test. The bill however still allows firing employees intoxicated on the job. This has created concern among employees as to how it will be handled.
The concern that the task force came together and began to ask was, “How strictly can the state regulate the private sector with regards to medical marijuana?”
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Louisiana’s task force, created through a study resolution authored by Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans, is looking at those states’ laws to draft proposals for the Louisiana Legislature to consider.
Task force member Troy Prevot, a physician assistant who conducts employment drug testing in the Baton Rouge area, said “many workplace policies and government regulations are outdated and still based on the mistaken belief that a positive drug test is an indicator of intoxication. A person who smoked a joint a month ago can test positive on a hair follicle drug screen and be deemed intoxicated even though they are not.”
“What is ‘under the influence’?” Prevot asked. “I get worried about using that kind of language. It’s unfair.”
None of the available drug screening technologies can indicate a definite time of when a person consumed a drug, and the levels of drugs a laboratory detects cannot determine if a person is impaired because individuals metabolize drugs at different rates, he said.
“There’s nothing that actually, that I’m aware of, links impairment,” Prevot said. “I would be very worried about this task force trying to use levels to show impairment.”
This story was first published by Louisiana Illuminator.
A federal court has ruled against Border Patrol again in a case on marijuana paraphernalia imported to legal states.
The ruling resulted in noting that the company Keirton can import equipment such as its “Twisted Trimmers” product that are used to separate leaves from marijuana plants in the state-legal market. The border patrol agency was claiming that the product was banned from import on controlled substances act laws.
The U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) has already established precedent in this unique situation recently, allowing the importation of trimming equipment from a Canadian company to a Washington state business.
Although the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) falls under the Department of Homeland Security, the department was represented by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the hearings. The DOJ tried to argue that the CBP exclusion from entry was necessary because the company intended to sell products used for the manufacturing of marijuana, which is a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).
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Keirton argued CBP’s exclusion of the subject merchandise from entry into the United States is unlawful because Washington State law authorizes Keirton to manufacture, possess, and distribute marijuana paraphernalia, exempting the subject merchandise from the Federal Mail Order Drug Paraphernalia Control Act of 1986.
The court said that the DOJ argument doesn’t hold up under a review of relevant statute that creates a drug paraphernalia exception for imports to states that have authorized the activity regardless of federal law. The reason being that the federal law carves out some exceptions to include the import and export ban when it is “authorized by local, State, or Federal law to manufacture, possess, or distribute such items.”
The DOJ stated that the CSA’s overarching purpose “is to create a uniform Federal prohibition and that allowing the exemption to extend to Washington State’s repeal would undermine the uniformity Congress intended,”
“However, Congress did not impose complete uniformity,” the court said. “It provided an exemption. Had it wanted to limit that exemption, it could have done so.”
Federal law defines drug paraphernalia as “any equipment, product, or material of any kind which is primarily intended or designed for use in manufacturing, compounding, converting, concealing, producing, processing, preparing, injecting, ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise introducing into the human body a controlled substance.”
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The court ruled that a repeal of prohibition by the state would be considered an authorization and that since the defendant argued that there is no Federal prohibition against the possession of drug paraphernalia, that the shipment was legal and authorized under state and Federal law.
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