Page 84 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2019

E m p l o y e e D r u g & A l c o h o l Te s t i n g
Drugs and Workplace Safety
The U.S. Department of Labor and the National Institute on Drug Abuse have found that employees who suffer from drug or alcohol dependency are nearly three times more likely to either cause or personally experience an injury-related absence from work.
BY JAMES A. GREER
80 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2019
www.ohsonline.com
With the rise of unions in the 1800s and the industrial revolution, work- place safety became a rallying cry for workers, particularly in areas such as coal mining, manufacturing, and other employment venues where potential safety hazards existed. While labor movements in Europe were the originators of promoting workplace safety, these efforts eventually made their way to the United States and after years of injuries and fatalities in the American workforce, state and local governments began responding to workers’ demands to regulate the workplace and ensure safe workplace environments.
The need for workplace safety in the United States at its beginning primarily focused on equipment and the conditions of the physical workplace. While those issues remain important, a new culprit affecting workplace safety has arrived in force, and the culprit is drugs and drug use by employees.
Over the last 40 years, the U.S. government, law enforcement, and academics have conducted re- search, including direct observations of the effect of drug use, including illegal substances and prescription medications, on the human brain. And in most cases, the evidence has been clear: When a person is under
the influence of a drug, whether for medical purposes or recreational use, the reflexes slow down, the ability to make rational decisions is negatively impacted, and the user can in many cases subject others to unsafe circumstances or environments that can cause injury and even a fatality.
In the 1980s, the U.S. government recognized this issue and formally adopted drug testing for the U.S. military, federal contractors, and, ultimately in 1991, the U.S. Congress passed the omnibus transportation employee testing act, which required all agencies un- der the U.S. Department of Transportation to imple- ment drug and alcohol testing for employees of the nation’s transportation industry who performed safe- ty-sensitive functions. This effort by Congress was in response to several well-known tragic accidents that resulted in injury and death where the use of illegal controlled substances was determined to be the cause.
While Congress mandated drug testing for the nation’s transportation industry, many employers adopted the philosophy that drug testing employees provides greater workplace safety along with other benefits. Recent statistics estimate that 14.8 million Americans use illegal drugs and 70 percent of them are employed. Furthermore, a significant percentage
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