Nearly one in ten U.S. employees in their thirties uses alcohol or drugs while working, researchers at Ohio State University said Tuesday.
They found that the risk for substance use is particularly pronounced among people in the food preparation and service industry and in construction and safety-sensitive occupations.
“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,” Sehun Oh, an associate professor of social work, said in a statement.
“In many federal-level transportation occupations, there are policies prohibiting operating under the influence,” he noted. “So we’re surprised to see that still 6 percent of material moving workers are working under the influence, and 2 percent of them are using marijuana — this was striking, because other than drug testing policies, it’s hard to implement interventions for workers moving from place to place.”
Previous research had suggested that substance use was common among people who work for long hours or evening shifts and those who earn low wages or have limited education.
The new analysis found that substance use at work is strongly linked to substance misuse outside of work. For example, people who used marijuana on the job were more likely to report using it every day and were more than twice as likely to be heavy drinkers compared to employees who didn’t use marijuana at work. Furthermore, employees who used cocaine or other hard drugs — such as opioids — while working were more likely to drink heavily, use marijuana more frequently, and report frequent illicit drug use.
“Our research shows that those under adverse working conditions with many barriers to economic and well-being resources tend to use substances as a coping mechanism, whether that relates to an emotional toll or physical demands of not just working conditions, but their life circumstances,” Oh noted. “There is a need for more structural support to address these huge implications for the health of workers and others, and to reduce the stigma associated with substance use.”
To reach these conclusions, the researchers looked at data from more than 5,400 employees who had been regularly surveyed since 1997, when they were between the ages of 12 and 17 years old. The surveys were conducted by Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research and concluded in 2022. Data supporting the study specifically came from the surveys conducted in 2015 to 2016, which marked most recent wave to collect information on substance use behaviors.
At the time, participants had reported substance use immediately before or during a work shift over the course of the past month. Among respondents, 8.9 percent of workers reported substance use in the workplace. Of those 5.6 percent said they drank alcohol, 3.1 percent reported using marijuana, and 0.8 percent said they took cocaine or other hard drugs.
The study’s authors say their findings suggest updated policies could help to mitigate workers’ misuse of alcohol and drugs.
In 2023, a study led by co-author Daejun “Aaron” Park, an assistant professor of social work at Ohio University, saw 20 percent of survey participants had reported their workplaces had no substance use policy.
It also found that comprehensive workplace substance use policies were linked to a drop in employee drug and alcohol use across many employment sectors. Oh found in his own study, conducted the same year, that only half of workers in a national sample had access to support services for substance use problems.
“Especially for those working in blue-collar or heavy manual jobs, they often have limited access to support to address substance use,” Oh explained. “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.”
The research was published recently in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
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