Colorado cannabis businesses with 250 or fewer employees qualify for the free evaluations.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) made a formal offer to Colorado marijuana companies for free-of-charge consulting services, including site inspections, to ensure that the businesses are free of potentially costly violations.
According to Marijuana Moment, the federal agency recently sent a letter to Colorado cannabis businesses offering “at your request, a free on-site safety and health evaluation.”
“All employers who avail themselves of this service will be required to abate all serious hazards identified during the consultation visit and to provide the consultation service with verification that these hazards have been abated,” OSHA wrote in the letter.
The initiative is part of a new OSHA outreach program to the cannabis industry, Marijuana Moment reported, aimed at educating the sector on federal workplace safety rules. The effort has been dubbed the “Local Emphasis Program for Cannabis Industries,” which hopes to reduce workplace injuries and incidents in the marijuana trade.
Businesses with 250 or fewer employees qualify for the free evaluations, OSHA said, which would be conducted by local agents from the Denver or Englewood OSHA offices.
OSHA has already been hard at work conducting inspections of cannabis facilities and reported already encountering “numerous serious safety and health hazards” for which citations were issued.
Over seven years, the agency said it has conducted 44 inspections of various marijuana companies, which included incidents of three fatalities at cannabis facilities. The first known cannabis worker death in the industry took place in Massachusetts in 2022, when a worker at a manufacturing facility owned by Florida-based Trulieve Cannabis Corp. died after a reaction to ground cannabis dust.
Despite marijuana’s federal illegality as a Schedule I controlled substance, OSHA still claims jurisdiction over the sector as a federal regulator of employers.
The education initiative is a temporary regional one and will sunset in 2029, after a formal report is filed by OSHA sometime in 2027, Marijuana Moment reported.
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