Article Review on Workplace Substance Abuse

Article Review: Everyone Must Not Get Stoned

This review will look at the problem outlined in the article, the issues related to the problem, the implications of the article to employees, employers, and society, the ramifications if the problem is not addressed, the benefits of resolving the problem and finally, solutions provided in the article.

The United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) conducted a workplace drug abuse survey on 14 different industries including the foodservice industry. According to SAMHSA’s findings, the foodservice industry was classified as being the third, which is an improvement since the last survey that put the industry first place with a 16.5% employees drug usage (5.3% employees higher than the recent result); however, it is still very alarming. This makes everyone look at co-workers differently.

The problem is that 38.5% of employees surveyed claim that their workplace does not provide them with information regarding alcohol and drug usage. “Ironically, it's in this area where this industry maintains a hands-off policy. The NRA's Educational Foundation provides information on how servers can deal with customers who are intoxicated, but it does not offer internal programs to assist restaurant workers with such problems.” (Sanson, 1999)

The implications of alcohol and/or drug abuse in the workplace are great. Not only it costs the nation as well as the industry billions of dollars, it also reduces productivity, which weakens the country’s and/or the industry’s competitive advantage while jeopardizing workers’ and customers’ safety. In addition to all this, it also causes employees and their families disastrous economic and emotional losses unless it is addressed effectively.

Resolving this problem can help maintain a drug free workplace and helps strengthen the competitiveness of the business and/or country while saving U.S. and the industry over $100 billion, which is an enormous amount of money that can be used where it is needed the most like building the economy

In the past, studies in the service industry revealed that the information they provided their employees regarding drug and alcohol usage actually helped the bring them down to have the lowest drug and alcohol abuse rate out of all the industries studied.