7 IN 10 DRUG USERS WORK FULL-TIME

WASHINGTON (AP) -- About 8 percent of full-time workers -- or 6.3
million Americans -- have used illegal drugs in the last month, the
government reported today. Workers in restaurants, bars, construction
and transportation were more likely than others to use drugs.

Nationwide, seven in 10 drug users were full-time workers in 1997,
according to a new report that officials hope will dispel notions that
most drug users are burned out and disconnected from the mainstream.

``The typical drug user is not poor and unemployed,'' Barry McCaffrey,
the White House drug policy director, said a statement. ``He or she
can be a co-worker, a husband or wife, a parent.''

The report, issued every few years by the Department of Health and
Human Services, found 7.7 percent of workers aged 18 to 49 had used
illegal drugs in the past month, a figure that has been steady since
1992.

HHS officials were using the report's findings to encourage businesses
to establish treatment programs. Increasingly, drug users are working
in medium-sized companies, which have the resources to establish these
programs, they said. Still, 44 percent of drug users were working for
small businesses -- those with fewer than 25 employees, down from 57
percent in 1994 but still the largest category.

``Whether you are corporate CEO or a small business owner, you need to
know that simple, low-burden, effective steps ... can increase
workplace safety and productivity and lower substance abuse and its
human and economic effects,'' said a statement by Nelba Chavez,
administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, the HHS agency that produced the report.

The report also found that in 1997:

- --Young adults, men, whites and those with less than a high school
education were more likely to use drugs than other workers.

- --Nineteen percent of food preparation workers, waiters, waitresses
and bartenders used illegal drugs. For construction workers, it was 14
percent; for transportation and material moving workers, it was 10
percent.

- --Workers who used drugs were more likely to have worked for three or
more employers, to have left a job in the past year and to have
skipped a day or more of work in the past month.