The Effects of Substance Use on Workplace Injuries

Table 3.1—Continued

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Substance Use and Misuse and Occupational Injuries: Empirical Evidence 9
1989–1990 NLSY using the 1979 cohort; Hoffman and Larison (1999) used a semicontinuous 
measure for days of drinking in the past year in the 1994 NHSDA. 
Drug Use and Occupational Injuries
In their analysis of the 1994 NHSDA, Hoffman and Larison (1999) not only looked at alcohol 
use, but also examined the impact of drug use on occupational injuries using semicontinuous 
measures of marijuana or cocaine use over the past year and found no evidence of a relation-
ship between drug use and occupational injuries. This finding, however, stands in contrast to 
three studies that all found evidence of significant, positive relationships between self-reports 
of drug-use frequency and work-related injuries. Shipp et al. (2005) examined frequency of 
alcohol use, binge drinking, and marijuana use over the past 30 days and lifetime frequency 
of marijuana, cocaine, inhalant, and steroid use. In this study of high school–aged workers, 
the odds of reporting an injury at work increased as frequency of use increased across all mea-
sures of substance use. Frone (1998) also studied high school–aged workers and found that 
self-reported 
on-the-job substance use (using a scale developed for the study based on eight 
frequency items related to alcohol and marijuana use) had a significant, positive effect on the 
probability of injury, though he did not find any relationship between general substance use 
and injury. Using the NLSY, Kaestner and Grossman (1998) found that past-year use of mari-
juana and cocaine increased the probability of reporting a workplace accident over the same 
time period by 25 percent among men, though there was no evidence of a relationship among 
women (we discuss differences by sex later).