This is the second in a two-part series that delves into worker safety inspections and fines from federal regulators overseeing the U.S. cannabis industry. Read part one here. 

While federal workplace safety inspectors may be in the process of ramping up their investigations of marijuana job sites – to the tune of expensive fines and time-consuming red tape – the move isn’t all that surprising for those already familiar with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Dealing with OSHA is now a part of the normal cost of doing business for marijuana companies, just like it is for any other mainstream industry in the U.S., said Kim Anzarut, a principal at Allay Consulting.

Anzarut, who’s been providing OSHA-related compliance consulting for cannabis companies since 2017, said operators can expect more direct interventions by the agency as the industry continues to grow, in part because of at least eight documented deaths that have taken place at marijuana businesses dating back to 2022.

“OSHA’s getting more and more involved because when people die, it’s a big deal. That’s OSHA not doing their job,” Anzarut said. “OSHA is just getting more involved, and that’s going to be the upward trend.”

Protecting workers

One of the primary things for marijuana executives to be aware of is that the federal agency has thus far only performing inspections on a reactionary basis, since it doesn’t have any cannabis-specific wing of its own, Anzarut said.

“They don’t have any cannabis specific regulation,” Anzarut said. “So they’re only going into places right now in most states that have a complaint. Somebody calls and says, ‘I was injured,’ or ‘This is an unsafe work environment,’ which we’ve run into many times… They don’t have the manpower, the funding, to go out and do regular inspections. Which is really unfortunate for workers in the cannabis industry.”

Anzarut acknowledges that dealing with OSHA can be a major headache, particularly for smaller operators that may not be used to running businesses with a high level of regulation and compliance, and she noted that it’s known as the “highest fining department in the United States.”

Often, violations and fines issued – along with mitigation recommendations – will depend greatly on the actual OSHA inspector performing workplace checks, making dealing with OSHA extremely subjective. It’s not as though a single violation always carries the same penalty, Anzarut said, but rather penalties can run the gamut depending on how severe a given OSHA inspector views a situation.

“It’s subjective to the investigator,” Anzarut said. “They can record all these violations, and depending on how bad a violation is, they can say, ‘Okay, we want the highest fine for this or the lowest fine.’ … If the regulator is logical and kind, essentially if you put in a corrective action, they can change that fine. They can get rid of it completely.”

Not only that, but even with a sizable fine, regulators often lower the “initial penalty” if a company shows good faith by attempting to correct whatever they were cited for, Anzarut said. The largest she’s ever seen with a client was roughly $100,000, but eventually she helped get the fine lowered to about $20,000, all by working on what are called “corrective action plans” and submitting them to OSHA.

“As long as you fix everything, they’ll usually lower that fine, unless it’s something totally egregious,” Anzarut said.

Fixes for OSHA violations are also commonplace, Anzarut emphasized, and sometimes issues can even be rectified on-site while inspectors are still present, if it’s a matter of misplaced safety documentation or something else relatively simple. The motive for OSHA, Anzarut noted, is not inherently to punish industry but to protect workers.

In addition, OSHA tends to be more lenient with companies that quickly respond to citations with written corrective action plans, Anzarut said. The downside of that is the filing deadline is typically only 15 days after a violation is issued, which often makes correcting OSHA-related violations an expensive rush job.

“They give you time to correct things and find documents. But it is a real scramble and it’s expensive and it’s stressful and crazy,” Anzarut said.

Still, fines in the tens of thousands of dollars are prevalent, and have been levied against cannabis companies of all sizes, according to agency records.

OSHA’s evolving relationship with cannabis

One of the newer violations that OSHA has formally announced for marijuana businesses is a requirement that they treat “ground cannabis dust” as a workplace hazard, according to a bulletin the agency put out in November. Ground cannabis dust was blamed for the death of former Trulieve Cannabis Corp. employee Lorna McMurrey in 2022, after she died from a severe asthma attack. Similar deaths also took place in Illinois in 2023 and then again last year, also at a cannabis facility in Illinois.

Anzarut said that despite the press attention surrounding the classification of cannabis dust as a hazard, industry insiders like her have known for years that it presents a risk to workers, though awareness has definitely been driven up by worker fatalities and the resulting OSHA fines.

“In almost every single grow that does grinding or manufacturing facilities that do grinding, we run into this issue, where people are complaining that they can’t breathe and that they’re coughing all the time, and they can’t be in that room for longer than an hour without sneezing and being just completely miserable,” Anzarut said.

“In the beginning, when I first started (cannabis consulting in 2017), it wasn’t considered a hazard at all. People didn’t even know it was a hazard,” she said. “Now when we get on calls with people, they’re like, ‘Hey, what do we do about the grinding room? What do we need to do to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us?’ … After that death, the Trulieve death, that is when people started asking about that particular issue within their facility.”

Still, Anzarut only expects more involvement from OSHA with cannabis companies as time goes on, in part because the agency’s inspectors are actively learning more about the marijuana trade. That, she said, is going to naturally lead to a growing cycle of inspections, violations, re-inspections and evolving industry rules to keep workers safe.

That uptick in enforcement by OSHA is likely already underway, with a pilot program that was announced in Colorado in September. Anzarut said OSHA inspectors will learn more from those “free” interactions with marijuana businesses, and they’ll pick up more on what to look for and how the cannabis industry is different from other trades.

“The newest trend that is starting to happen is states are getting funding to have an OSHA program within their state,” Anzarut said, pointing to the Colorado news. “They put out a press release essentially to all of the people in the industry and said, ‘Hey, we’re really worried about worker safety. We are actually going to have an OSHA program that is specific to cannabis in Colorado.’”

Anzarut said that program’s likely to be helpful, but that it could also function as sort of a regulatory Trojan horse, because OSHA inspectors could come across major violations that Colorado marijuana business owners didn’t know were issues.

“That’s starting to happen in more and more states, and it’s because of these deaths,” Anzarut said. “They don’t want an industry to be under the radar, and then more and more people get hurt.”