Trauma goes silent when a worker is fired, and yet, steps to improve mental health might cause that employee to face termination. Services, including cannabis stores, run like clockwork, but the gears ticking behind the face are human. Does this mean a worker who has become unpolished and worn from an exogenous force warrants the chance to recover rather than deal with further consequence? Endocannabinoid tone is crucial, movement can be critical, and community is often referred to as a lifeline when masking mental health.
Traumatic experiences can demand some problem-solving to maintain the human parts of society. Sadly, however, humility is often buried under fiscal demand.
Survival and protection with medicinal cannabis
An employer’s neglect for humility is almost a cruel irony within the cannabis sector. An industry that serves as a cultural centrepiece for a large community of self-serving patients coping with various deficits to mental health such as trauma, pain, or depression. Patients in the sector are brought together by their instinctual drive to improve endocannabinoid system (ECS) health.
The ECS depicts a biological matrix that maintains our drive to survive and protect, largely regulated by cannabinoids, diet, and exercise.
Trauma instead flips that drive into high gear, which can churn a rational mind into a maddening chant of torment. Essentially, exercise and movement will divert that mind away from the urge to fight which negates the desire to dangerously repress.
Trauma masking and personal therapies
Unfortunately, obligations can make trauma masking difficult during work hours for employees of certain businesses. Employees are often forced to manage trauma’s deafening, internal torment in a way that brings relief without stopping the cogs of society.
Small personal aids help stretch oneself into an appropriate routine. For mild cases, functional therapies, especially medicinal cannabis, dullens a negative buzz of visual and auditory memories. This is because different assets of the endocannabinoid system uniquely regulate depression, anxiety, and the pace of thought. To be blunt though, therapies such as medicinal cannabis, psychedelics, or pharmaceuticals have proven to be desperate band-aids when the surrounding community refuses to heal.
Mental health disrespected, a caveat for employers
For a mind racing dangerously, small exceptions beyond silent relief have the potential to improve the behavioral health of the whole workplace. With this in mind, and if these exceptions can remain relatively covert, should an employer be expected — or required — to respect their staff’s needs?
An employer who escalated to celebrity status, Dan Price, has been adamant about giving employees respect and choice. In many cases, individuals who mask pain, trauma, and other illnesses only require small steps that veer from the rhythm of society to sustain their well-being and to remain motivated by trust.
That said, society’s cogs still need to turn. As an example, brick-and-mortar cannabis stores have been central access points for patients effectively escaping pain and cancer for over a decade in British Columbia, Canada. Reciprocally, budtenders who are knowledgeable about the products they serve are vital crutches for patients forced to shop in non-medical storefronts.
Moreover, some of the most knowledgable members of the cannabis industry happen to be educated, medical cannabis patients.
Overcoming the one-speed fits all problem
A complex production line where a large operation comes to a halt if one person is removed from the process might have to follow more strict policies. Therefore, mental health challenges, including trauma, should be resolved delicately to ensure an employee in the cannabis industry can fairly avoid termination. To allow any worker to treat their mental health without potentially being fired, though, one central problem must be resolved universally — communication.
Open-ended discussion must be liberal; no employee should be scared to talk to their employer openly – but our privacy is justly catalyzed by wrongful prejudice. Adding to internal traumatic stress, the use of medicinal cannabis for any purpose in prohibitionist cultures is still sadly a cause for punishment far more severe than termination of an employee.
Philosophized by Albert Einstein, similar social-economic issues reflect challenges that keep us closer to totalitarianism rather than a viable utopian society. Alas, the balance between bureaucracy, community, and demand continues to be dynamic.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which unionized the first cannabis store employees under BC Bud, was contacted for a statement but has yet to give a response.
Let us know in the comments how you think an employee should be treated in the face of post-traumatic stress that unfairly puts them on the brink of termination. And stay tuned to learn how psychedelics can assist psychotherapy by resetting mental health.