Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder will receive $3.7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the impacts of airborne toxins at cannabis facilities.
According to reporting from 9News, the concerns about safety in facilities stem from employees developing allergies and asthma from cannabis job sites. “Right now, they’re operating completely in the dark,” senior research associate at CU Boulder, Tess Eidem, Ph.D., told 9News. “People get sick. People have respiration issues. They have asthma attacks, and no one really knows why.”
Occupational asthma, a type of asthma that occurs when one breathes in dust, gas, fumes, or other toxic substances while at work, has become a notable issue within the cannabis industry.
A survey from the University of California Los Angeles Labor Center found that 24% of cannabis workers experienced asthma or allergies that originated from their work environments. And in 2022, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported the first death attributed to occupational asthma in cannabis production, when a 27-year-old employee of Trulieve died from a fatal occupational asthma attack in Massachusetts. And while these are just documented cases of health issues at cannabis facilities, Eidem fears that the actual number could be higher. “These are not documented very well, so there could be others,” she explained. “This workforce is really vulnerable and it’s understudied.”
As cannabis remains federally illegal, concerns about federally mandated protections for employees in the cannabis sector continue to be rampant. “The workers might not be fully protected in these environments where there’s very little federal oversight and there’s not always good practices that are being followed in these workplaces, which could allow mold to really grow rampant in these facilities” Eidem continued.
Researchers will focus on the impact of air quality on the immune system and lung cells by collecting air samples from cannabis facilities. Certain kinds of mold, like Aspergillus fumigatus, will also be studied. “There’s very little that is known about what’s in the air in these cannabis facilities,” Eidem noted. “We were really just trying to get some kind of baseline understanding of what’s floating around in the air that could be contributing to these asthma and allergy issues.”
Eidem hopes that the research will provide guidance for ensuring a safe work environment for those in the marijuana industry; along with providing important insight into a pocket of the American labor force that is not entirely understood.
