Educate Employees about Heroin and Other Drug Abuse with an In-house Employee Newsletter

Reasonable Suspicion Training is an educational topic that should change and adjust more often than it does right now. That finally happened. You would have to be hiding under a rock not to notice the drug abuse crisis in America associated with opioids like heroin, fentanyl, and Oxycontin. It’s so outrageously bad that the U.S. Department of Transportation is changing its rules and drug panel information to ensure these substances and their derivatives can be identified in drug testing screens. This makes it important to education managers if you are conducting DOT Supervisor Training whether this is reasonable suspicion training or simple education for all supervisors to support your drug free workplace policy.

Other drugs of abuse that are making a comeback include cocaine, but many other substances of abuse are rampant in American households, and some can be quite deadly. For example, one is Salvia. Another is Spice/K2. Another is Bath Salts. These drugs are often abused by teenagers, but the Army has a big problem with Spice/K2.

Let’s switch to your employee newsletter or workplace wellness company newsletter, whatever you want to call it. I hope you have one by now. Nevertheless, here is how it can save lives. This is not small stuff.

If do not think that your employees won’t read tightly written articles about these substances, then you have not reading this blog often enough. Here’s how to make a difference and give a helping hand using your newsletter to help reduce drug abuse.

First, visit the DEA.gov website home page. Any content you find at DEA.gove is in the public domain and you do not need their permission to re-write it or borrow the images from it to incorporate in your in-house EAP, employee wellness newsletter, or company productivity newsletter.

Topics like substance abuse are important in your employee newsletter because the newsletter is likely to go home with the employee to a spouse. There, the information will be discussed. Are you beginning to see how content from your employee, wellness, or company newsletter can make an impact with ripple effects that touch on the lives of many people? This should give you new motivation to keep your newsletter going.

My recommendation is to avoid the cookie recipes and funny jokes people put in a company newsletter to use up space and increase its entertainment value. My recommendation is not to abuse a captured audience in a workplace with this sort of content. Let them get this information while reading the morning paper, instead.

With a little bit of thought, you could be making a big social impact on drug and alcohol abuse, but also on many other topics. To prove it, I will discuss diversity awareness next blog article.

Did you checkout DEA.gov above. Do it now. This is one Web site I recommend to content writers of corporate health newsletters when substance abuse education is needed.

Check it out about once every three months or so. Going back over the last several months, you can see that the Drug Enforcement Administration put out a nationwide health alert on fentanyl as a threat to health and public safety.

Fentanyl is a seriously addictive and dangerous substance responsible for many deaths in the U.S. In the past several years, thousands of people have overdosed on it. So, what should employees know to protect themselves and their families? 

I am pretty sure with reasonable suspicion training and drug and alcohol screenings, this will soon become a more widely discussed problem. Note: Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin. The dust in an empty bag of Fentanyl could kill. This is a prescription drug, and it used in the treatment of pain.