Why does drug and alcohol testing matter? Because almost one in ten employees in their 30s use alcohol and drugs. Do you want someone using drugs and/or alcohol operating your machinery, driving your vehicles, performing complex tasks?
According to this article from Ohio State, almost 1 in 10 workers in their 30s uses alcohol, marijuana or hard drugs like cocaine while on the job in the United States.
The risk for substance abuse among young employees was highest in the food preparation/service industry and in safety-sensitive occupations including construction.
Researchers say these new findings suggest comprehensive substance use policies and supportive interventions could improve safety and help reduce workers’ misuse of alcohol and drugs.
Lead author Sehun Oh, associate professor of social work at The Ohio State University said “It’s easy to blame someone for using substances, but we want to pay attention to understanding their working conditions and barriers at the workplace.”
[R&A Comment – We have written before about the importance of Employee Assistance Programs in how they help productive employees cope with substance addiction.]The research was published recently in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
The study sample included 5,465 young employees who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, a nationally representative sample of men and women who were aged 12-17 in 1997 and were interviewed regularly until 2022. The NLSY surveys were conducted by Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. Data for this study came from the 2015-16 survey, the most recent wave to collect information on substance use behaviors.
Results were based on participants’ reports of substance use immediately before or during a work shift in the past month. Among respondents, 8.9% of workers reported any substance use in the workplace, including 5.6% drinking alcohol, 3.1% using marijuana and 0.8% taking cocaine or other hard drugs, a category that also included opioids.
“We’re really concerned to see the findings for safety-sensitive occupations – not just in construction, but also installation, maintenance, repair, transportation and material movement,” Oh said.
Both Oh and Park said these new findings shed light on the impact that comprehensive employer substance use policies and supportive programs for workers could have.
Variations in workplace substance-use policies may be one explanation for industry differences in risk for employee alcohol and drug use on the job, Park said. In a 2023 study he led, 20% of survey participants reported their workplaces had no substance use policy. The research showed that comprehensive workplace substance use policies – which included recovery-friendly initiatives – were linked to a significant decrease in employee drug and alcohol use across many employment sectors. [We wrote about the importance of a drug testing program and its relation to reduced drug use.]
“The work categories least likely to have substance use policies tend to be those managed individually by owners or workers,” he said. “Also the arts, food service, entertainment, recreation – those kinds of workplaces don’t tend to have polices in place.”
And Oh found in a 2023 study that only half of workers in a national sample had access to support services for substance use problems, such as counseling, at their places of employment. Availability of workplace support services led to lower rates of marijuana and other illicit drug use among workers.
“What I found was policy alone can’t be effective in reducing substance use problems – policies need to be accompanied by support services,” he said. “That’s one thing we propose in this paper – that combining alcohol and other drug policies with supportive services produces the greatest benefits, rather than relying on either alone.”
The analysis also showed substance use in the workplace had strong associations with off-work substance misuse: Users of marijuana on the job were more likely to report daily cannabis use and were more than twice as likely to be heavy drinkers compared to those not using marijuana at work, and employees on cocaine or other hard drugs while working were more likely to drink heavily, use marijuana more frequently, and report frequent illicit drug use.
James P. Randisi, President of Randisi & Associates, Inc., has been helping employers protect their clients, workforce and reputation through implementation of employment screening and drug testing programs since 1999. This post does not constitute legal advice. Randisi & Associates, Inc. is not a law firm. Always contact competent employment legal counsel. To learn more about the rights of employees who test positive for marijuana, Mr. Randisi can be contacted by phone at 410.494.0232 or Email: info@randisiandassociates.com or the website at randisiandassociates.com
