An Analysis of Worker Drug Use and Workplace Policies and Programs

1.1 Summary of NHSDA Methodology

The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA) is the principal source of statistical information on the use of illicit drugs by the United States population. Conducted periodically by the federal government since 1971, and annually since 1990, the NHSDA collects information by administering questionnaires to a representative sample of the population age 12 and older at their places of residence. Since October 1992, the survey has been directed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The two primary goals of the survey are to estimate the prevalence of illicit drug use in the United States and to monitor trends in prevalence.

The NHSDA includes residents of households, noninstitutionalized group quarters (e.g., shelters, dormitories, rooming houses), and civilians living on military bases. Persons excluded from the survey, and thus from the population it represents, include the homeless who never use shelters, active military personnel, U.S. citizens living abroad, and residents of institutionalized settings such as jails and hospitals.

The household interview takes about one hour to complete and includes procedures designed to maximize honest reporting of licit and illicit drug use (such as the use of self-administered answer sheets). Information is collected on the recency and frequency of use of a variety of licit and illicit drugs, opinions about drugs, and drug treatment history (for details, see Office of Applied Studies, SAMHSA, 1996a).

In addition to detailed information about drug and alcohol use, the NHSDA collects basic demographic information on employment, race/ethnicity, age, education, sources of income, marital status, health status, and problems associated with drug use. In 1994, a special workplace module was included in the NHSDA. The purpose of the module was to collect detailed information from employees regarding the size of their workplace, workplace accidents in which they may have been involved, their company’s drug testing programs, their absences from work, their separation from work (e.g., voluntary, firing), and their workplace’s policies and programs regarding drug and alcohol use.

This report uses the information obtained from these questions to examine several issues regarding worker drug and alcohol use and workplace policies and programs designed to address drug and alcohol use. It focuses primarily on 7,055 NHSDA respondents, age 18-49, who reported that they were working full-time (35 hours or more a week) at the time of the interview. These respondents represent over 78 million full-time workers in the United States. For comparative purposes, this introductory chapter examines current illicit drug and heavy alcohol use among full-time workers, part-time workers, and the unemployed. The remaining chapters of the report address full-time workers only since they make up a large percentage of 18-49-year-olds in the NHSDA sample. Part-time workers are not included in this analysis because they represent very diverse groups that may include students, homemakers, and others who might be only nominally involved in the labor market. These groups have different rates of drug use and employment histories that make interpretations of the kinds of analyses presented in this report problematic when they are combined (see Hoffmann et al., 1996). The report relies primarily on graphical representations of the principal results, with Appendix A providing tabular representations of the data. Appendix B provides a detailed list of the questions asked in the special NHSDA module and a list of other relevant questions that are used to obtain data for this report. The principal drug use measures analyzed in this report are current illicit drug use—use of any illicit drug in the past 30 days—and heavy alcohol use—drinking five or more drinks on five or more occasions in the past 30 days. The past-month measure of illicit drug use is used rather than a past-year measure in order to coincide more closely with employment status, which is measured at the time of interview and may have changed in the past year.

Table 1.1 shows a breakdown of the illicit drugs that NHSDA respondents, age 18-49, reported that they had used in the past month. The information in the table demonstrates that marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, followed by psychotherapeutics and cocaine. A large proportion of those reporting current illicit drug use said that they had used marijuana only (62.8%).

This page was last updated on June 03, 2008.

SAMHSA, an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, is the Federal Government's lead agency for improving the quality and availability of substance abuse prevention, addiction treatment, and mental health services in the United States.