Under the Influence? Drugs and the American Work Force (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Introduction
Introduction
Pages 15-26
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From page 15... ...
The use of illegal drugs in recent years is thought to pose problems so severe as to justify a "war on drugs." The current war on drugs overlooks, however, the abuse of alcohol and tobacco, which cause more deaths in the United States than all illegal drugs combined (Newcomb, 1992~. Whereas illegal drugs are estimated to be responsible for approximately 30,000 premature deaths in the United States per year (Reuter, 1992)
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From page 16... ...
This may be due, at least in part, to the publicity given two recent tragic accidents, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the Amtrak train crash in Maryland, as well as to the "war on drugs" policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. The effects of such events on perceptions of the alcohol and other drug abuse problem remind us that what constitutes unacceptable drug use varies not only across cultures but also within a culture.
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They include the health care costs for treating AIDS patients, crack babies, victims of premature heart attacks, and others. They also include costs related to missed devel
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and the relative frequency of heavy illicit drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, the social magnitude of the total premature death costs attributable to illicit drugs is still not at the level of those attributable to either alcohol or tobacco.
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From page 19... ...
. Given that alcohol is considered the most commonly abused substance from both the public health/social welfare and workplace perspectives any intervention program that strives to have a meaningful impact on either the health of the general population or the productivity of a specific work force should not limit its efforts to the detection of a few illicit drug classes but should target alcohol as well.2 20ne could argue that the long-term health effects of tobacco and caffeine and their more immediate withdrawal effects on behavior also warrant attention (Silverman et al., 1992; Hughes, 1992; Snyder et al., 1989; Snyder and Henningfield, 1989)
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From page 20... ...
We consider only substances whose use is problematic enough to represent a meaningful threat to the welfare of individual users or others and whose prevalence is high enough among the work force to have the potential to affect business productivity. The report focuses its attention on general drug class categories (see Table 1.1)
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This simply means that the abrupt cessation of drug taking produces a set of symptoms called a withdrawal syndrome. The presence of physiological dependence does not necessarily imply abuse or dependence in the behavioral sense.
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From page 22... ...
Work force alcohol and other drug use is the use of those substances by any work force member, whether the use occurs on or off the job, so long as the use has potential workplace effects. Consequently, issues concerning hangover or residual effects of alcohol and other drugs taken when not at work, as well as correlates of individual alcohol and other drug use and work force participation, are all relevant.
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From page 23... ...
There are a number of mechanisms that are used by the scientific community to ensure the scientific adequacy of studies, including the peer review process used in scientific and professional journals, the use of scientific advisory panels and review groups, and the use of external reviews of research prior to its execution and/or publication. Many of the studies reviewed in this report failed to incorporate any of these mechanisms, and they frequently failed to employ the research methods most likely to yield interpretable and valid results or failed to report their results in ways that allowed us to adequately evaluate their findings.
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From page 24... ...
Part III addresses the effectiveness of intervention programs with special emphasis given to drug-testing programs. Given that drug-testing programs are commonplace in American corporations today, the committee felt that special attention to this form of drug use intervention program was imperative.4 Chapter 6 describes current analytical methods used to test biologic specimens for drugs and discusses the strengths and weaknesses associated with the procedures and techniques for analyzing biological specimens (e.g., urine, hair, saliva)
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From page 25... ...
National Transportation Safety Board 1990 Safety Study: Fatigue, Alcohol, Other Drugs, and Medical Factors in Fatal-to-theDriver Heavy Truck Crashes, Vol.
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From page 26... ...
Henningfield 1989 The tobacco withdrawal syndrome: performance decrements assessed on a computerized test battery. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 23:259-266.
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