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The elder ranking member of House leadership, Harold Wright; used a procedural tactic to get his draconian smoke ban bill out of an 'unfriendly' Rules Committee, and make a deal with the House Judiciary Committee Chair; to get the proposal to the House floor for a full vote.
Using the pretext of protecting an employee from a workplace where a patient might utilize cannabis, the new law would allow agencies to assess fines between $100 to $1000, perhaps several times per year.
Our initial comprehension of the text of the Oklahoma Workplace Clean Air Act is that it would allow just one employee to force the owner of a business to change the premises to a fully smoke-free environment regardless of the circumstances. The only exception would be a Veterans center.
No longer can a business owner make a policy for the enterprise he created. Even private clubs are subjected to the ban, by just one employee declaration. The House Rules Committee has been dominated by lawmakers who largely support the medical use of cannabis under physician oversight. Most of last year's Medical Marijuana reform legislation sailed though this committee and received overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses. Harold Wright is the ceremonial Speaker Pro Temp and represents a rural district from western Oklahoma. His home of Weatherford has perhaps the toughest ordinances to hamper patients' access to cannabis medicines. |
Representatives Harold Wright & Chris Kannady
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Wright is now using the pretext of having the power of state authority supercede a proprietor's discretion just because an employee might decide the shop would be better off with a ban on personal vaporizers, even if that device is a physician's recommended medical treatment for an emergency health crisis.
PTSD suffers, which include thousands of combat veterans, are using personal vaporizers to provide immediate reprieve from flashbacks, panic attacks, and chronic anxiety conditions. Cancer patients are relying on cannabis medicines to battle the severe nausea which chemotherapy treatments cause. Many patients routinely vomit up meals when the nausea and digestive complications persist. Inhaled medicine delivery is the only effective means of administering the anti-nausea cannabis meds, because ingested forms of cannabis don't 'stay down' long enough to get passed the unsettled stomach. |
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