Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/1001084
W EEKLY EDITION JULY 4, 2018 CONTINUED ON PAGE 4 Legal Marijuana: Driving the Portable Sanitation Industry Crazy Part 1 ….. continued By Karl een Kos, PSAI Executive Director Is it ever okay for portable sanitation drivers to use pot? In theor y anyway, a portable sanitation company operating in a state where the use of marijuana is legal could sidestep these issues. To do that the company would : • have to use drivers operating only in that state and never in any other since the FMCSA applies when interstate commerce occurs; • use only trucks that fall below the weight limits requiring federal DOT/FMCSA oversight of commercial vehicles; • need to crea te and enforce policies that specify how much pot use is acceptable for operating a motor vehicle on behalf of the company; • be obligated to find an insurance carrier willing to write a policy for coverage that accounts for the risk of employing drivers wh o smoke weed on their time off. If all of the above conditions were met, the portable sanitation company could – theoretically - allow their drivers to use pot when they are not at work. In practice, at least right now, it would be something to approach w ith extreme caution and abundant legal advice. One toke over the [imaginary] line. The fact is, even if your company doesn't fall under DOT/FMCSA rules and you WANT to consider hiring or retaining drivers that occasionally smoke legal pot, there is simpl y no precedent yet for how to "do this" with marijuana in the same way as there is with alcohol. With alcohol, each state has set a limit at which a driver is considered legally impaired and thus is not allowed to operate a vehicle. Among the states that h ave some form of legal marijuana, not all have set similar limits for pot. For example, Colorado and Washington law specifies that drivers with five nanograms of active tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — the drug in marijuana — in their whole blood can be prosec uted for driving under the influence (DUI). In Oklahoma where voters legalized medical marijuana last week, the new law says nothing about legal limits for operating motor vehicles. Perhaps because the Oklahoma law is only a week old they can be forgiven – but many states with older statutes haven't set limits either. Minnesota legalized medical marijuana in in 2014 but has set no specific limit for impaired driving, and it is not alone. States from Maine to Alaska have legalized some form of marijuana us e, but they have not set legal limits for driving impairment. (You can check out your state's laws and limits on the Governor's Highway Safety Association website here .) P A GE 3