What to Do about Coworker Cover Up and Enabling

Coworkers become enablers like anyone else in the immediate circle of the active addict's life. These employee are no different than supervisors, the employee with a drug or alcohol problem him or herself, family members, or supervisors. Everyone enables until a point in time comes that they are not enabling. This reality is 100% universal fact among alcoholic and drug addicts. If you live with an addict and think you are not enabling, you are probably fooling yourself, but it is more likely that you don't understand enabling completely. Enabling can be very subtle and it can mean doing something, not doing something, saying something, or not saying something that helps the addict not recognize or accept the consequences of his or her behavior, no matter how small, linked to the use of alcohol or other drugs of abuse. To impact the workforce and reduce the risk of substance abuse on the job, or the effects of substance abuse on the job, it is critical to educate employees about Workplace Substance Abuse so they are educated to dispel myths and false hoods about addiction. This is why we created the Alcohol and Other Drugs at Work: What Employees Should Know product.