Employee alcohol and illicit drug use: scope, causes, and organizational consequences

Employee alcohol and illicit drug use is an issue that is important to and has received attention from managers, unions, policymakers, politicians, researchers, and the media. There are several reasons for this attention. First, use of alcohol and illicit drugs may undermine employee health, productivity, and safety, which leads to costs being incurred by employers. Second, in the US, passage of the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988 made employee substance use a salient issue for certain employers. Third, a large industry has developed around the issue of testing employees for the use of illicit drugs, and in some cases for alcohol use.
Although research on employee alcohol use can be traced back at least to the early 1940s, systematic empirical research has grown considerably over the last 15-20 years. Nonetheless, many research findings have not found their way to relevant stakeholders, (e.g., managers, unions, policymakers, politicians, researchers, and the media) and many gaps exist in what we know. Consequently, it is not uncommon for the issue of employee substance use to produce erroneous commentary on its scope, causes, and organizational outcomes. Such commentary is often based on speculation, vested interests, and pseudoscience rather than on objective interpretation of all available scientific data (e.g., Costa e Silva, 2002; Maltby, 1999).
The goal of this chapter, therefore, is to summarize what we know and do not know about the scope, causes, and organizational consequences of employee substance use. The first section of this chapter explores the scope of alcohol and illicit drug use among employees in the US and in other national contexts. The second section summarizes the causes of employee substance use, and the third section looks at organizational consequences of employee substance use.
Each of these three sections ends with suggestions for future research. The final section provides an integrative summary and concluding thoughts. [Introduction]