 It took me out of reality, you know, if I had a problem, it just, I forgot about my problem. If you had a problem, I could solve any world crisis on cocaine. I did a lot of drinking while I was a foot patrolman. I would drink in uniform in business establishments, usually in the back room. Drug addicts and alcoholics are so smart, and they'll really think these things through them and they waste more energy on hiding their habit. And so I was very careful as to not cross the same circles and no one ever thought that I could have a problem. I could go and buy the drugstore diet pills and take nine, ten a day just to get a bus to where I could clean my house. I used them everywhere. I used them in the operating room. I would go to the surgeon's lounge and when I was into the demoral, shoot-up demoral or when I was into the cocaine, snort cocaine before going to the operating room. Americans take drugs, alcohol, pot, coke, uppers, downers. We use young and old, on the street, at the corporate level, at home, off and on the job. Drugs have become a part of our culture and drug abuse a fact of life. One out of ten Americans abuses alcohol. An estimated one in twenty is addicted to illicit drugs. Many more misuse prescriptions or use a variety of drugs. Consider the families, friends, those who work with the drug user and the figures of those affected are even higher. I did not want to be a mother. I wanted to do my dough and have my friends and do my drinking and I couldn't do that with a baby. Like my aunt who loves me, it was like this is one lady that I would never hurt. Took her TV and took her gas money. So all my nevers came true because it was like this copement so much to me. Within the workplace, studies indicate that drug abuse costs the U.S. economy $60 billion each year. This translates into higher absenteeism, increased accidents, sick leave and medical claim costs. There are mistakes made, the products poorly manufactured and the markets lost. I'm a welder and the steps are supposed to be strong off the whole elephant and I mean I've had steps break where people fell through. I would say they broke it. They tried to steal them and scrap them in the junkyard. Lying, it would be alright for me to kill somebody just to get caught. There were times I would take downers, sleeping pills and set the alarm and I could get to the phone but I couldn't crawl to the phone. But I couldn't get up and I would just call them and tell them that I'd been sick all night or my child had been sick all night so I wasn't going to be in. We found out that effective people use the health delivery system 13 and a half times more than those who do not have a problem or not affected. Their families use it two and a half times more. That's only the beginning. And I remember waking up in Buffalo and going to work and being on a rooftop with the worst hangover that I can remember in my life and standing on a cold rooftop in Buffalo with a Palm Beach suit and a raincoat with no line looking down at President Carter and wondering just when was he going to be finished making this speech so I can go get another drink. In a way, it's a very dangerous drug for a surgeon because it reinforces his God complex. When you're in that operating room, you better be God because you have to be able to handle anything that comes along. With a snoot full of cocaine, there was no argument you were God. With cocaine, if you take the drug acutely, you have increased energy, you feel more confident, you feel that you can do things you normally couldn't. I had a film to produce and I was on this set all the time and I thought, this drug makes me much more creative. This drug makes me feel good, makes me smart, makes me speak well. I think I'll do it more. And I did and so I just, within six weeks I was addicted to cocaine and I knew it. I was free-basing. I thought I couldn't think about anything but cocaine. Initially when you start using a drug, you feel this is something you can control. The, as you keep taking it, and that's what I meant by insidious, as you keep taking it, at some point you find that you cannot control the use anymore, that the drug is controlling you. Drugs at work. The costs are varied. The consequences can be devastating. It was a usual day of trying to get Saris off. She was just so excited about getting back to school and being there for her first round of exams and seeing all of her classmates again. But on January 4th, 1987, Amtrak's Colonial 94 collided with a Conrail locomotive that was on the same track. 16 people killed. 175 injured. 17 million dollars lost in damages. The Conrail engineer had been impaired due to marijuana use. The engineer of the Conrail train that caused the tragedy had a dozen convictions, several suspensions, and he had been arrested for drunk driving only about three weeks before the crash. He had not responded to a work call 51 times in the year before the crash. For myself, I thought drug abuse was limited to the people who were abusing drugs. I felt sorry for them that they felt that their lives were such that they had to try to escape from them in some way. But I thought if anything happened, it was going to be limited to them. What I did not realize was the enormous extent somebody else's drug abuse having an impact on society. Her enthusiasm for life was infectious. What makes her death seem even worse is that it was entirely needless. Other people's disrespect for their own safety as well as other people's safety killed her, which is absolutely senseless. Drug abuse, pervasive, costly, deadly. How do we start to address drug abuse at work? It begins by educating everybody in the workplace. The major stumbling blocks are people who operate on misinformation, stereotypes, or prejudice, people who look at drug abusers as criminals and people who should be not treated but instead thrown out of the job. We have seen a great deal of improvement in this area, and we hope that the trend will continue, that more and more employers will recognize that people with drug problems are ill and in need of services. If anyone told me in March of 1976 that I was an alcoholic, I would have told them they were crazy because I could drink with the best of them. My tolerance was great. When I was into the demoral, I carried loaded demoral syringes in my socks. I would leave the house with six preloaded syringes every morning, three in each side, and it never occurred to me that that was somehow a little bit abnormal. I kept doing my job. I mean, for me, and I think for many people who have had problems, that is the thing that they try to keep intact for as long as possible. It's their one way, if they can get to work in the morning, if they can do their job, then they don't have a problem. Over the course of the next year and a half, I had probably at least a dozen more overdoses, and these were usually when I was alone, and I'd come to with my face on the floor, my tongue kind of chewed up, and about all I'd learn from those episodes was, gotta be careful at dose. In the past few years, the government and corporate realms have taken action to address the problem of drug abuse on the job. In 1986, in a massive effort to establish a drug-free workplace, President Reagan initiated a comprehensive drug abuse policy for all federal employees. We seek to create a massive change in national attitudes, which ultimately will separate the drugs from the customer, to take the user away from the supply. I believe quite simply that we can help them quit. Within each agency, a comprehensive drug-free workplace program is underway. We really feel the basic purpose of any drug policy should be to get the substance-abusing employee into treatment, get them the help that they need, and get them back on the job. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that any policy, any program, have access to an employee assistance program. These are programs of health professionals where, if an employee has a problem, they can go to these programs by themselves, or the supervisor can refer the employee to the health professionals to find out what the problem is, to get them help, and to help to make them a better employee. There is employee education to inform employees about the health consequences of drug abuse. There is supervisory training. Training, not necessarily to recognize the signs and symptoms of drugs, but how to deal with the problem employee and how to get that employee over to the employee assistance program. And then fourth, there's a testing component. The testing component of any program is really an important one in terms of allowing the organization to cut through the denial process that is typically associated with substance abuse. In the 25 years I've been dealing with people abusing drugs, I could count on the fingers of one hand those individuals who felt when they started that they weren't getting into trouble. Normally people have this idea it isn't going to happen to me. This cocaine was so great that it would tell me I did not have a problem. See, the only problem I had, you know, and I found that out, I didn't have a problem until I ran out of cocaine. As long as I had cocaine, I was okay. I never had the problem with the drugs. It was the people around me who had the problems. You know, they're the ones who couldn't deal with things. I was fine. I was okay. I thought. I remember taking a sip of this little bottle of vodka or something and seeing myself in the mirror as my head came down from drinking and thinking, what is happening to me? This can't be normal. And yet I still, I went into the stall to drink so I wouldn't see myself in the mirror to begin with, but I still thought, no, it's this guy. It's this guy that doesn't know how to party. You can tell me all about cocaine and demoral and alcohol and all the difficulties it causes, and I could say, yeah, you're really right and I really feel badly for those people who have troubles with it as I put the needle in my arm. For one federal agency, the Department of Transportation, safety is of critical concern. Under the 1986 Presidential Initiative, DOT was the first executive agency to implement random testing as part of a comprehensive drug program for civilian employees. This testing applies to those in safety or security-sensitive positions. People like air traffic controllers, rail safety inspectors, anyone whose performance on duty could directly impact the safety of the traveling public or if his or her fellow employee is in the random pool. Drug testing starts from a very simple premise that the public has an absolute right to be protected from the consequences of alcohol and drug use in the workplace. I don't think you can have an effective drug program without testing. Testing is the incentive that puts the hard-core person into a voluntary program. If you don't have testing, you are saying to people, please address your problem, please address it. Some people will respond to that, but everybody won't. But the increased activity in testing is not without controversy. Some courts will decide that random drug testing is permissible because of the need to fight drug abuse while at the same time, under very similar facts, a different court will find that random drug testing is unconstitutional because it violates the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. That has been the legal battleground. The Department of Transportation Drug Program goes beyond testing. It includes extensive awareness and education. There is counseling and rehabilitation provided for those who use drugs off the job. He gave me this memo that says that I've been using my leave to excess and I don't see it that way at all. At another federal department, Health and Human Services, education is a key element of the effort. Managers and supervisors are trained to be aware of the effects and signs of drug abuse and to refer employees to enter the employee assistance program. We had called security, we had called the health unit and they were prompt, they were there. He's in counseling now. What happens next? The first thing I think we've learned is you need a very active and well-running employee assistance program. The idea of rehabilitation should be the principal focus of a program. It should not be a program to say, gotcha, we're more concerned with trying to help people, putting them into a rehabilitation program and putting them back into a successful job performance. And I know it's drugs, I know it's drugs and I found it. And I see these supervisors thinking, let's try to pinpoint the employees and who has a problem. Well, the fact is they may have a problem themselves so you need to be really honest with yourself first and then start looking at your staffs. Take the disease out of the closet for one thing, that's one of the things that's really important. It's okay to be chemically dependent if you do something about it. Corporations are also taking action. Over 45% of Fortune 500 companies have adopted some form of drug policy. Employee assistance programs have more than quadrupled in the last several years. The first step that management and union should take is to decide that they do away with the adversary relationships and that they both should be working towards the common goal of survival of that person and survival of that job and economy. One corporation, Capital Cities ABC, a media conglomerate with over 19,000 employees worldwide, addressed this issue in 1984. I suspect that many of us were vaguely aware of the reality that, like all other elements of American society, we probably had a drug problem. But the specific impetus for our, what's become our program was the fact that we experienced a death during working hours on corporate premises from a cocaine overdose. We have operations, I suppose, in perhaps 25 or 30 of the 50 states. And it seemed we had essentially the same problem every place. Aware of the need and committed to the effort, Capital Cities launched an extensive drug awareness campaign which reached employees nationwide. A program is only effective if employees are aware of the services available. We need to be concerned because we all have families. Some of us are married, some of us are not, but we still have families. And if we don't look for each other, you know, somebody's going to get hurt. It is plainly stated in our rules that there will be no drinking, no drugs under the influence of anything. They just won't tolerate it, which is a good thing because we have lots of equipment, good possibility of getting hurt. So you're getting my work? Yeah. Every day? Yeah, just about what I was going to say, you know, and then I'll go for a couple of days and I'll just cool out a little bit, you know, I just won't use it at all. A hotline service was instituted in 1986. It has served over 650 Capital Cities employees. A single call puts an employee in touch with a counselor who can provide support and additional resources. I do believe there is a pervasive feeling now that wasn't there a year and a half ago that we were sincere about this, that to this day, if there are 650 people, I do not know by name a single one of them. I'm not interested in knowing that. I'm just interested in trying to see to it that they have some place to go to try to get help. They'll help you commit yourself to a drug rehab program and they will work with you all the way through. You don't have to worry about losing your job or anything of that nature. It will be here once you complete that program. Ultimately, this drug program is judged by the individuals it can reach. My desk was like a drug store. No one ever went through it, so they were not aware. I was buying some of my drugs from where I work. I was buying crystal, crank, whatever they had available. And a memo had come out at work that said several employees had already been terminated for drugs, you know, selling on the premises and things like that. One of the guys that had been let go was one of the people that I bought dope from. And I got very scared. So I went ahead and told my manager and my supervisor at that time that I think I might have a problem. I did not realize she had a drug abuse problem. And at the same time, then everything sort of tied together for me. I knew why she had the mood swings and I knew why someday she could do the work and someday she couldn't. And I knew why she had the attendance problem. They wanted, at first, I kind of talked to this man from the EAP off. And I kept really kind of putting him off and thinking, well, I can stop myself. I'll just stop. I won't take anything else. I won't buy from anybody else. I won't take anything else, you know. But I kept getting real depressed. I was getting more and more depressed. I was at home and I had taken, I guess at that point, it had been about three of the Tylenol with coating in them. And I took a gun down and I just kept thinking, you know, I can't deal with this. You know, I can't do this. I've had enough pain in my life and I couldn't do it anymore. And I sat on the end of my bed for a long time just looking at the, you know, into a barrel of a guide thinking, well, my arms are too short to actually, you know, pull the trigger. And then it hit me every time I'd ever stayed home being sick when my daughter got home. The first thing she would do was come running to my room, jump on the bed with me, put her arms around me and ask me how I was. She always took care of me. And I just, you know, cried and I just, you know, screamed and I yelled and just, God, I need help. You know, I need help and this isn't the way out. Rhonda, yes? Capital cities worked out the financial details. I'm very thankful for what they did for me. Basically what they did while I was in treatment is make me deal with why I drank and why I did drugs. A lot of people think they're going to come out of treatment and they're cured, you know, they're going to walk right in and it's going to be everyday living. It takes a lot of getting used to again. It's a whole new thing. Drugs at work, a reality we can no longer ignore. There are costs in productivity, dollars and lives. But there are solutions. It begins with awareness and education. In order to change an attitude, we need to begin with education. I don't think we can change an attitude otherwise. It takes working together, getting informed. This is a devastating, painful process for the employee themselves and they need to get the support that they need in order to get well. It means developing programs which ensure help for those in need. Productivity at work and safety for the public. The road is long, the issues complex. But the rewards incomparable. They've given me a chance to live. And I think of those little stickers, no thanks. I'm driving, you know, about the drinking thing. And mine's always no thanks. I'm living and I love it.