A woman in Texas was recently fired from her public education job was recently fired for posting about cannabis online.
In May, Kerri Owens lost her job as a special education contractor in Allen. She thinks her posts online about the benefits of CBD are what triggered the move to fire her, and now she wonders why she deserves the treatment she faced.
A recent expose at Reason magazine showcased Owens’ tribulations in the face of a seemingly unjustified dismissal from her livelihood. [1]
Owens shared a graphic on her Facebook page which asked, “Is CBD good for you?” and included information about the body’s endocannabinoid system.
The following week, the school principal called her to the office and told her an investigation would proceed into her behavior, because someone had complained about the post. [1]
Across the U.S., where hemp and CBD became legal federally in 2018, people have started to turn to cannabis more and more for their chronic pain, anxiety and insomnia problems. Many states have also legalized it in the time since, including Texas back in June. [2]
“At the time of the post I had not used the product. I had not purchased them. I had not sold any,” Owens told Reason. [1]
This didn’t help her case, and she lost her job where she had worked with the same special needs child for three-years after just a week-long “investigation” by the school.
“It was really a surprise to me that they wouldn't have tried to talk to me about it or give me some other kind of disciplinary action besides just fire me,” she told Reason. [1]
At the high school where she worked, Owens was like a “school mom” to the 10th grade student who was bound to a wheel chair, had trouble writing quickly, and was non-verbal, the story explains.
“The way Kerri knew how to help her and the way she was let go at the last minute—it caused stress on my daughter,” Martinez says. “When you're dealing with special needs kids you can't just change something and not let anyone know.”[1]
Owens’ case is particularly egregious, but over the course of the first half of 2019, it wasn’t the worst overreach by employers and even law enforcement against the misunderstood cannabis product.
CBD is non-psychoactive, unlike marijuana, but that didn’t stop Texas police from seizing thousands of dollars worth of hemp supplies from business-owners this spring.
Other misled crackdowns happened in Maine, New York City and elsewhere in the country, including over the summer in South Dakota, when a truck driver was arrested for traveling with over 400 pounds of hemp flower in tow.
Read the full story on Kerri Owens below!
Sources
[2] https://cannabusiness.law/texas-passes-hemp-and-cbd-law-effective-immediately/
