According to the National Survey Council, 70% of businesses say prescription drug use affects their workers and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse indicates that 1 in 7 Americans over the age of 12 have some kind of substance problem. These two data points from different perspectives certainly illustrate that this is a real and immediate problem for employers.
In fact, drug and alcohol abuse is so prevalent in the American workplace that in 2017 the National Safety Council together with the University of Chicago created an online "calculator" that businesses can use to find the "real" costs using variables like number of employees, by state and by industry.
We already know that substance abuse costs American businesses hundreds of billions of dollars annually from accidents, healthcare costs, lost productivity, and liability. The National Institute on Drug Abuse provides the following estimates-over $740 billion in annual costs from crime, lost productivity and healthcare breaks down as follows:
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