In Virtually Every Industry, Use Among Employees Is on the Rise

By BARBARA MARSH

July 7, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

A year ago, the 31-year-old computer systems manager for a global drug company in Southern California felt crushing job pressures. He ran a department of 35, answered to bosses across several divisions and sometimes found himself working up to 48 hours without a break.

“A major part of the system would crash and we’d be getting phone calls from literally everywhere, demanding systems be brought up,” he said. “The pressure was just from everywhere.”

The $110,000-a-year engineer tried to cope the way rising numbers of Southern California workers in pressure-cooker jobs are: He snorted methamphetamine. At first he took the drug, also known as speed, at the office to stay alert while working late. Soon he was using it every few hours to maintain his edge.

“It felt like having 15 cups of cappuccino all at once,” he recalled.

Whereas the numbers of police raids on meth labs, chemical explosions and emergency hospitalizations mark a rising epidemic of methamphetamine abuse, its impact is increasingly being felt in the workplace.

Methamphetamine is showing up more and more in drug tests on California job applicants and in random tests of workers, according to Neil Fortner, vice president of laboratories for PharmChem Corp., a testing firm in Menlo Park, Calif.

Of 300,000 tests it performs annually, about 15,000, or 5%, now come up positive, Fortner said. Speed accounts for 35% of the positives, up from 20% two years ago, and it has edged out cocaine, which has slipped about 5 percentage points to 30%.

Methamphetamine abuse is a rising problem nationwide, but experts say it’s particularly common in Southern California because of the many meth labs that crop up here, most in isolated parts of San Bernardio, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties.

“Amphetamines are an epidemic in Southern California,” said Ed Kaufman, a psychiatrist and noted addiction specialist at At Capistrano by the Sea, a psychiatric hospital in southern Orange County that treats about 1,000 substance abusers a year. “We see more amphetamine abuse at this hospital than we do any other drug or alcohol.”

Adds Tom Hanley, a regional manager for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Anaheim: “There’s no question that methamphetamine is used a lot on the job and is certainly involved in some accidents.”

Amphetamine-related emergency admissions to California hospitals--most involving meth--jumped 49% to 10,167 in 1994 from the previous year, according to the latest statistics available, in a report released last week by the nonprofit Public Statistics Institute in Irvine.

Broken down by county in Southern California, those 1994 admissions came to 1,558 in Los Angeles County, up 35% from the previous year; 662 in Orange County, up 67%; 894 in San Bernardino County, up 67%; 1,389 in San Diego County, up 39%; 499 in Riverside County, up 28%; and 133 in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, up 138%.

In virtually every industry, experts say, more people are abusing the drug, as they are often deluded into believing it can help them work harder, better, faster and longer.

Meth’s popularity has also sparked a debate among health-care providers about how addiction to it should be treated. Experts in the managed-care industry tend to prefer outpatient care, but others believe chronic abuse requires more complex, and often more costly, measures such as hospitalization.

Methamphetamine, also called crystal or crank, is an amphetamine derivative developed by a Japanese pharmacologist in 1919. Although it is prescribed to treat attention deficit disorder and obesity, it, like other amphetamines, has been much abused since it came on the market in the 1930s.

An injectable, highly addictive form of meth used by “speed freaks” in the 1960s prompted the government to tighten controls on its manufacture in 1970. Abuse of meth fell off during the 1970s as cocaine became increasingly available.

But meth has become more popular in recent years, especially in California, now the nation’s center for clandestine meth labs. The drug is easy to make, cheaper to buy than cocaine, and it produces a feeling of euphoria that lasts for hours--an effect strongly alluring to workers trying to keep up.

In rare instances, treatment professionals say, company supervisors have even encouraged its use--unofficially. Dr. Hans Geisse, an addiction specialist at Kaiser Permanente’s clinic in Moreno Valley, Calif., cites situations in which a supervisor and employee are friendly and the supervisor suggests, “Gee, if we do this, we’ll be able to finish the project.”

Paul Swigart, a manager at Blue Cross of California, said his office has encountered seven cases in the last year of supervisors who had either sold or supplied speed to employees.

Several years ago, a factory worker with a severe case of meth abuse confided that her boss handed her some one day with the remark, “Here’s a bag of overtime.”

As with many meth users, the computer engineer’s problem started long before he entered the work force. He first tried speed in 1983, while he was a junior in college in the Midwest.

“One of my roommates was telling me how this stuff was great,” he said. “You could literally take it and be wired for a while, and it wouldn’t affect you that much and you’d be super-productive.”

He took some to stay awake while cramming for an exam. He stayed up for two days, felt enormously invigorated and started using every few weeks, mostly to help him study.

“Everything--be it sex, the ability to concentrate, my sense of smell--was heightened,” he said. “And I loved to eat when I was high. I’d make a hamburger, and it was the most incredible thing I’d ever eaten.”

At a job with a major drug company and while he was rising through the ranks of the high-pressure systems department, he would find himself turning more often to his secret source of go-power.

Indeed, job pressure became his rationalization for using.

“It turned into every time I felt pressure, I had to have some,” he said.

But as is typical for heavy users, the drug began to make him extremely irritable.

“At times, it made me feel like I was just over the edge,” he said. “I was just so wired and jittery.”

Finally, the drug’s effects became so overpowering that they disrupted both his job performance and his marriage.

His department lost a key account after failing to complete a project. At home, arguments over his drug use escalated and his wife threatened to leave.

His physician, Geisse of the Moreno Valley Kaiser clinic, said speed-addicted patients now make up about 56% of his substance-abuse practice there. As cravings for the high the drug produces demand increasing use, many users deceive themselves into believing they’re still productive when they aren’t, Geisse said.

Workers take the drug anywhere they don’t expect to be caught--the restroom, a stairwell, a private office, in the car during break and even, for those who travel, the airplane bathroom.

In one common pattern of abuse, an employee will snort speed before heading to work in the morning, take it throughout the day as effects wear off, down alcohol at night to counteract the buzz, wake up hung over and start the cycle again.

Paul Cleary, a regional manager for Blue Cross, said that although the speed and alcohol superficially offset each other’s effects, physiologically “they cancel each other out the way two autos do if they crash into each other at 50 mph.”

When there’s a speed user in their midst, co-workers often sense there’s something wrong but can’t put their finger on it, treatment professionals say.

The paraphernalia are easily concealed: a small plastic bag or vial for carrying the stuff; a business card holder, mirror or some other flat surface to hold a hit; a razor for pulverizing the powder and forming it into lines; and a short straw for sniffing it.

One clue is the person who disappears into the restroom stall but doesn’t flush the toilet, then returns to the office or assembly line sniffing or playing with the nose.

Some users maintain their personal hygiene. But other, heavy users, who stay awake for long hours, will skip needed showers and appear at work with unkempt hair and wrinkled clothes. They will often pick at their skin, leaving sores on the arms, legs or face known as “speed bumps.”

“Normally, when people get very advanced into their use, you see them losing weight, looking pale and somewhat frail. They’re very irritable, nervous and anxious,” Geisse said.

“Normal situations, like going out to lunch with the group, are often avoided.”

Relations with co-workers often deteriorate as users get edgy, sometimes explode at the slightest criticism and, in rare instances, lash out physically.

Swigart, the Blue Cross manager, tells of a severely addicted female supervisor in the San Diego area who became noticeably disheveled, lost weight, let her personal hygiene and attention to nutrition go and one day assaulted a co-worker.

“People taking crystal can become emotionally and physically wrecked to the point where other people can’t even recognize them anymore,” Swigart said.

So where, in the middle of it all, can the addicted worker turn for help?

Increasingly, as more California employers look for ways to save on workers’ benefit costs, a worker’s only option is to seek help through a managed-care company, whether it be a health maintenance organization or company that specializes in providing mental health and substance-abuse benefits.

In the days before managed care, chemical dependency treatment was often extremely expensive--28 days in the hospital for detoxification and intensive therapy, followed by outpatient rehabilitation and months of counseling. The costs ranged from $8,000 to as high as $30,000 for a psychiatric hospital.

Now, many people who would have been hospitalized in the past are treated solely in outpatient programs, with costs ranging from $3,200 to $4,500, said Jack Platt, a Laguna Hills consultant specializing in drug abuse treatment.

Some managed-care companies won’t approve hospitalization for drug detox, some won’t approve time in a residential treatment center, and many put limits on the length and frequency of treatment.

“Most HMOs are refusing to admit speed and cocaine patients to the hospital to be stabilized,” said Max A. Schneider, medical director of St. Joseph Hospital’s chemical dependency services in the city of Orange. “Then they limit both the intensity and duration of care.”

Doctors say patients coming off speed can run the risk of seizures, extreme paranoia, elevated blood pressure or even suicide--all of which are hard to control outside a hospital.

However, managed-care companies insist they handle addicted workers properly. Dr. Alan Savitz, a psychiatrist who heads PacifiCare’s mental health company, said people recovering from chemical dependency usually fare better in outpatient settings. He argues that the length of time a patient stays in treatment, rather than the intensity, generally determines whether the individual will recover.

He said patients in residential treatment programs are sheltered from the temptations they will eventually have to face again when they are released.

Savitz said he believes outpatient treatment should continue for a year, involving care during withdrawal, group and family therapy, and a support group of former users.

He said PacifiCare occasionally covers a hospital stay for medical reasons or time in a residential treatment setting if there’s a risk of, say, spousal abuse. Otherwise, he said, the patient should receive outpatient treatment while living in his or her community.

“We seldom say no to people asking for outpatient help,” he said.

To be sure, substance abusers rarely make it easy for anybody trying to help.

A 35-year-old maintenance worker living in Orange County first tried speed two years ago at a party.

That evening, the normally quiet man suddenly found himself talkative.

“I stayed awake all night,” he said. “It helped me to party.”

Better yet, he discovered, as he used the drug often after that, it helped keep his mind off his girlfriend. She’d left him a year before, taking their toddler with her, and he missed them both.

The drug energized him for anything, any time.

“I’d be cleaning the garage at 11:30 p.m.,” he said. “It kept me from being depressed.”

A year ago, the drug’s ill affects caught up with him. He was using it on top of drinking heavily, felt extremely depressed and often couldn’t pull himself out of bed to go to work.

“I felt like I had to do something. I was in trouble and going down,” he said.

He called an HMO for help. He downplayed his drug and alcohol use over the phone, however, emphasizing instead the pain of the split-up with his girlfriend. He was referred to a physician.

He didn’t tell the doctor the extent of his substance abuse either.

“I didn’t think it had anything to do with it,” he said.

The doctor referred him to a mental health specialist, who prescribed Prozac for depression, he said. When he developed migraines because of the Prozac, he was prescribed Darvocet for the pain.

He took himself off Prozac, began taking more Darvocet than the doctor had specified and wound up with a new addiction to replace his abuse of alcohol and speed.

Meanwhile, his employer was running out of patience. On Darvocet, he had trouble getting up in the morning and missed 25 days of work in five months.

Last September, his employer fired him.

“I never told them I had problem,” he said, “until it was too late.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Methamphetamine Wave

Employees facing strenuous deadlines and family pressures are turning to methamphetamines for an extra boost. But the drug is highly addictive and can lead to overdoses and death. Overview of methamphetamine use:

Most Abusers Are Employed

A 1994 survey of drug users shows users are:

Employed: 74%

Unemployed: 10

Other*: 16

*Disabled or incarcerated

Drug of Choice

Admissions to California drug treatment centers in fiscal 1994-1995. Primary drug used and percent of total:

Methamphetamine: 33.4%

Other amphetamines: 1.4

Heroin/opiates: 26.7

Cocaine/crack: 23.6

Marijuana: 12.5

Other: 2.4

Note: Excludes alcohol users and methadone treatment programs.

The Local Picture

Methamphetamine admissions as a percentage of all drug treatment admissions, by county, 1994-1995:

Los Angeles: 12.6%

Orange: 35.4

Riverside: 52.5

San Bernardino: 50.0

San Diego: 44.7

Ventura: 26.3

Sources: California Alcohol and Drug Data System, U.S. Household Survey on Drug Use, 1994

Researched by JANICE L. JONES/Los Angeles Times

Who’s Using Meth

Most methamphetamine users are whites between the ages of 25 and 35. It is abused almost equally by men and women. Demographics of those admitted for treatment of methamphetamine addiction in California, fiscal 1995:

Ethnicity: % of total

White: 76.5%

Latino: 16.4

African American: 2.8

Asian: 2.2

Native American: 2.1

Gender

Male: 50.5%

Female: 49.5

Age

Under 18: 6.7%

18-24: 24.0