IMPACT IN THE BUSINESS
Substance abuse is a hard problem to eradicate in any business setting, but it can be particularly difficult to address in small business settings. After all, many small business owners develop close—or at least friendly—relationships with their employees because they often work together on projects and share smaller work areas. "Because many small business owners have one-on-one relationships with each employee, dealing with an employee who is addicted to alcohol or drugs is a personal as well as a personnel problem," wrote Barbara Mooney in Crain's Cleveland Business.

But substance abuse experts and business researchers alike warn that substance abuse problems are not the sort of problems that tend to go away by themselves. Rather, they often continue to grow and fester, further strangulating the business's productivity and profitability. Indeed, substance abuse often ends up being a tremendous drain on a company's fiscal well-being. This drain takes many forms, including decreased productivity, increased absences, rising numbers of accidents, use of sick leave, and jumps in workers' compensation claims. Indeed, HR Focus reported in 1997 that "alcohol and drug abusers are absent from work two-and-a-half times more frequently than nonusers; they use three times the amount of sick leave as nonusers; their worker's compensation claims are five times higher; and they are generally less productive." This latter factor—what HR Focus termed "the less dramatic, day-to-day financial losses that accrue in a company when its workers are impaired and performing below potential"—can be particularly deadly to a business precisely because its impact is so hard to detect and quantify. Finally, substance abusers often compromise the efficiency of other workers within the business. Co-workers are often hampered by the substandard work of the abuser, and in many cases their effectiveness may be further curtailed by a sense of obligation to cover for their co-workers—who, after all, are often their friends as well.