Almost 1 in 10 workers in their 30s uses alcohol, marijuana or hard drugs like cocaine while on the job in the United States, a new study has found.
The risk for substance use among young employees was highest in the food preparation/service industry and in safety-sensitive occupations including construction - a sector linked in previous research with a high risk for drug overdose deaths.
Based on their prior studies of workplace strategies related to employee substance use, the researchers say these new findings suggest comprehensive substance use policies and supportive interventions could improve safety and help reduce workers' misuse of alcohol and drugs.
"Especially for those working in blue-collar or heavy manual jobs, they often have limited access to support to address substance use," said lead author Sehun Oh, associate professor of social work at The Ohio State University. "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."
Oh completed the study with Daejun "Aaron" Park, assistant professor of social work at Ohio University, and Sarah Al-Hashemi, a recent Ohio State College of Public Health graduate.
The research was published recently in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
Previous research has suggested that substance use is common among people who work long hours or evening shifts and earn low wages, or who experience life stressors such as low annual household income and limited education. But few studies have been able to report on substance use during work hours, and the occupations at highest risk for on-the-job alcohol and drug use, because the data is hard to come by.
"There are many studies looking at specific occupations and their risks, and the prevalence of substance use outside work," Oh said. "There is very limited evidence on workplace substance use, which is more concerning in terms of occupational safety, not just for the workers but also colleagues or others exposed to the workplaces. This is the only data we know of to inform this issue."
The study sample included 5,465 young employees who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, a nationally representative sample of men and women who were aged 12-17 in 1997 and were interviewed regularly until 2022. The NLSY surveys were conducted by Ohio State's Center for Human Resource Research. Data for this study came from the 2015-16 survey, the most recent wave to collect information on substance use behaviors.
Results were based on participants' reports of substance use immediately before or during a work shift in the past month. Among respondents, 8.9% of workers reported any substance use in the workplace, including 5.6% drinking alcohol, 3.1% using marijuana and 0.8% taking cocaine or other hard drugs, a category that also included opioids.
Statistical modeling showed a higher risk for all types of on-the-job substance use among food-industry workers, higher alcohol use among white-collar workers (linked in prior research to drinking while cultivating business relationships or celebrating accomplishments), and elevated alcohol and marijuana use in 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," Oh said. "In many federal-level transportation occupations, there are policies prohibiting operating under the influence. So we're surprised to see that still 6% of material moving workers are working under the influence, and 2% 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."
Both Oh and Park said these new findings shed light on the impact that comprehensive employer substance use policies and supportive programs for workers could have.
Variations in workplace substance-use policies may be one explanation for industry differences in risk for employee alcohol and drug use on the job, Park said. In a 2023 study he led, 20% of survey participants reported their workplaces had no substance use policy. The research showed that comprehensive workplace substance use policies - which included recovery-friendly initiatives - were linked to a significant decrease in employee drug and alcohol use across many employment sectors.
"The work categories least likely to have substance use policies tend to be those managed individually by owners or workers," he said. "Also the arts, food service, entertainment, recreation - those kinds of workplaces don't tend to have polices in place."
And Oh found in a 2023 study that only half of workers in a national sample had access to support services for substance use problems, such as counseling, at their places of employment. Availability of workplace support services led to lower rates of marijuana and other illicit drug use among workers.
"What I found was policy alone can't be effective in reducing substance use problems - policies need to be accompanied by support services," he said. "That's one thing we propose in this paper - that combining alcohol and other drug policies with supportive services produces the greatest benefits, rather than relying on either alone."
The analysis also showed substance use in the workplace had strong associations with off-work substance misuse: Users of marijuana on the job were more likely to report daily cannabis use and were more than twice as likely to be heavy drinkers compared to those not using marijuana at work, and employees on cocaine or other hard drugs 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 said. "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."
