What to Do About Coworker Cover Up of Drug Using Employees

The DOT does not require drug and alcohol education of employees in unregulated positions in companies, and supervised employees are also not required to have training in drug and alcohol awareness. It is the supervisor who must be trained. If you are like me, you know this is pretty nuts, but requiring employees be trained in drug and alcohol

awareness and having it mandated would raise all sorts of issues.

Well, blow it off. Get a training education for your employees if you want an effective drug-free workplace program. If you do not, there is a heck of a lot of myths and misconceptions, and enabling you in your workforce that you are never going to touch.

Coworkers become enablers like anyone else in the immediate circle of the active addict's life. These employees are no different than supervisors, the employee with a drug or alcohol problem him or herself, family members, and supervisors.

Everyone enables until a point in time comes that they are not enabling. This reality is 100% universal fact among alcoholic and drug addicted relationships. If you live with an addict and think you are not enabling, you are probably fooling yourself, but it is more likely that you don't understand fool scope of what enabling actually is and how it can manifest.

Enabling can be very subtle--even putting a dirty dish in a sink the drinker left on the table--could conceivably be a form of enabling under the right circumstances. Enabling is doing something, not doing something, saying something, or not saying something that helps the addict not recognize or accept the consequences of his or her behavior, no matter how small, that is associate with the direct or indirect use of alcohol or other drugs of abuse.

To impact the workforce and reduce the risk of substance abuse on the job, or the effects of substance abuse on the job, it is critical to educate employees about Workplace Substance Abuse so they are educated to dispel myths and false hoods about addiction. This is why we created the Alcohol and Other Drugs at Work: What Employees Should Know product. You can preview it here on the page.