OPINION: Prevalence and Impact of Substance Abuse in Corporate America

Posted on April 28, 2022 by Bailey Mead, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Scroll through any given popular social media platform, and you’ll likely come across several heartwarming stories of triumphant recovery in the overcoming of drug and alcohol addiction. Near those, you’ll probably find as many or more horror stories about the impact that drugs and alcohol have had on the lives of many people, across different walks of life. Time and time again, online forums have attracted more than a few haughty comments suggesting that “addicts” are somehow dirty, “grimey,” no-good degenerates who should be alienated from society in a number of creative ways, and “dealt with accordingly,” whatever that means in a given thread. Due to this stigma surrounding individuals impacted by addiction and substance use, one wouldn’t typically imagine these people to be the doctors, lawyers, realtors, bankers, or sales professionals we interact with day to day.

Despite being what one could consider to be one of the lesser publicly-discussed topics in both the fields of Mental Health and Addiction Treatment, and certainly in casual day-to-day conversations among the average professional layperson, substance misuse and abuse amongst management professionals and healthcare providers remains an insidious reality that impacts our nation en masse.

Responsible for the oversight of many employees at a given organization, managerial impairment has the potential to negatively impact the lives of up to all subordinates beneath the user, as well as the user’s own managerial staff. A 2015 survey report (Bush, & Lipari, 2015) by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) revealed that 12.1% of management professionals had used illicit substances within the month prior, and 11.4% within the year prior. There certainly exists no shortage of memes, vlogs, articles, and social media threads discussing a variety of atrocious things employees have had to endure on the job, regardless of industry. One has to wonder if many of the endless horror stories of “bad bosses” could have been spurred on by the presence of substance abuse. Is it possible that substance abuse in corporate organizations could be contributing in part to the declines in overall workplace morale, increases in new hire turn-over, and continuing resistance to returning to the office in post-pandemic America that are being mentioned more and more in the media?

If thinking about that dynamic concerns you, try imagining the impacts of substance abuse taking place in a healthcare setting, where the physician tasked with attempting to save your life could very well be too impaired to use sound judgment in the process of doing so.

Some studies (Sepkowitz, 2017) have found that physicians are more likely to engage in prescription drug abuse than their own patients are, and it is estimated that there are between 8% and 15% (Bryson, 2017; Kunyk, 2015; Oreskovich et al., 2015) of healthcare providers that have misused drugs or alcohol actually within the workplace setting, including pharmacists, nurses, and physicians. Keeping these numbers in mind, one can deduce that there is a relatively decent likelihood of patient engagement during those incidents of substance use on the job, and begin to question what kind of quality of care those patients could have received because of it. Perhaps even more disturbing is the question of how many serious injuries and even deaths might have occurred during those incidents, due to substance-impaired medical errors. We can’t drive under the influence for a reason, and one can argue it is even more important not to practice medicine under the influence either. How bitterly ironic would it be for the mother who was hit by an impaired driver who might have otherwise survived to ultimately be killed by the medical errors committed by an impaired doctor? This is not a game.

It is not hard to guess how substance abuse in these settings can get very dangerous, very quickly, so why isn’t it discussed more? We need to talk about it as a society, as we move toward a more collectively socially conscious mindset. Perhaps the reason it is seldom “called out” is because of how taboo the subject is, combined with the fear of backlash that professionals likely face when considering how to get treatment. That might be so, but we should consider another possible contributing factor: a doctor abusing his prescription medications faces the same stigma that the homeless “junkie” on the street does, once the doors to the Narcotics Anonymous meeting room close. Truly, addiction can be what some consider as a great equalizer between those two worlds. Is this only a stigma problem, then? Or could it also be a professional and organizational ego problem? Nobody can know, but one thing that is certain is that we should discuss it more, and provide help to those who wish to seek it to break down barriers to treatment for these populations. More than just the individual in treatment can benefit, and in fact tackling this issue could do a part in helping to improve at least one aspect of our nation as a whole.

References

Bryson, E. O. (2018). The opioid epidemic and the current prevalence of substance use disorder in anesthesiologists. Anesthesia and Medical Disease, 31(3), 388–392. (reference link sharing prohibited by Noomii)

Bush, D. M., & Lipari, R. N. (2015, April 16). Substance Use And Substance Use Disorder By Industry. SAMHSA. Retrieved 2022, from (reference link sharing prohibited by Noomii)

Kunyk, D. (2015). Substance use disorders among registered nurses: Prevalence, risks and perceptions in a disciplinary jurisdiction. Journal of Nursing Management, 23(1), 54–64. (reference link sharing prohibited by Noomii)

Oreskovich, M. R., Shanafelt, T., Dyrbye, L. N., Tan, L., Sotile, W., Satele, D., West, C. P., Sloan, J., & Boone, S. (2015). The prevalence of substance use disorders in American physicians. The American Journal on Addictions, 24(1), 30–38. (reference link sharing prohibited by Noomii)

Sepkowitz, K. (2017, July 12). The secret world of drug-addict doctors. The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2022, from (reference link sharing prohibited by Noomii)