Drug And Alcohol Training: What Alcohol On The Breath Should Mean To Supervisors

Don’t let your drug and alcohol training may miss this fine point: Your employee may be steady as a rock, but an employee with high tolerance to alcohol can be totally drunk and appear sober as a judge. You smell alcohol on the breath but your employee says he didn’t drink before coming to work? It might be true, but try the night before. Alcoholics with liver problems will stay drunk for hours on very little booze because metabolization slows due to the dysfunctional operation of the liver. Recommendation: Do a drug screen.

Does your organization have an alcohol and drug policy that prohibits employees from coming to work after drinking? About about lunch? Can they drink a couple martinis and they come back to the worksite after heading to Whole Foods?

This is a big problem for many companies whose zero tolerance policies don’t add up.

The fact is that many employees with one martini under their belt may act drunk while the true, bona fide alcoholics with high tolerance could have three martinis and appear completely unaffected.

Many hospitals have alcohol and drug policies that prohibit day-time drinking but these same hospitals often excuse their medical staffs. Why? The answer is simple. The rate of alcoholism among doctors is twice that of the general population according to research. Doctors run hospitals. They are the money train. That means appeasement. On average 14% of the doctors in most hospitals are diagnosable alcoholics in early or late stage, or in remission and recovery. There is not way to predict what percentage have their work performance affected. Still, how are you going to address this issue.

Alcohol and the issues that surround it make it difficult to decide how to handle use during the workday in many organizations. It is important to consider these issues. In Great Britain 25% of the workforce drinks alcohol and lunch, and although they have drug testing their laws based upon reasonable suspicion, alcohol on the breath is not a legal criteria — alone — to make a decision to require a reasonable suspicion drug test. If this was a potential justification, there would hell in the streets. Indeed, in the 18th century, British sailors were allow a liter of liquor a day. The absence of alcohol almost doomed the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

When doing drug and alcohol training, many naive organizations believe it is a supervisor’s role to only evaluate “work quality” of an employee, but it is work performance that should be considered. Work performance means much more. It includes quality of work, attendance, behavior, availability, attitude, and other conduct issues. Conformance to the alcohol and drug policy is part of what should be obviously not overlooked.

The smell of alcohol is a legitimate “symptom” that can be objectively identified. The supervisor does not have to worry that it could be “something else.” It any case it is the employee’s burden to prove that it is something else because safety demands that it not be the other way around. The drug test is how the proof is provided. The Supreme Court has ruled the drug testing does not violate privacy rights – period.