Just like when he was the company wonder kid--a super sales executive who was tall, suave, good-looking and on a very fast track--Bob Poznanovich wowed them.
This time he wasn't selling computers, though. Instead, he told a stunning story about how drugs had fueled an executive's tumultuous fall from the corporate heights, and how nobody at work stepped forward to break the fall.
It was his story.
The story of someone who grew up in the shadow of Chicago's far Southeast Side steel mills and then raced through the salesman's ranks to become an executive at Chicago-based Zenith Data Systems--only to blow almost everything on a $1,000-a-day cocaine habit.
As his habit grew, worried company officials, colleagues and customers fretted about him, but nobody confronted him. Finally, the company let him go in a job cutback.
Out of control, his $216,000 severance pay and thousands of dollars more in savings went for his coke habit during the next 2 1/2 years. Now the head of a company that offers guidance in addiction crises, Poznanovich's message at a recent suburban Chicago gathering was that businesses must break "the conspiracy of silence" that often surrounds addicts.
Indeed, despite years of talk about drug-free workplaces, some companies remain in the dark about workers' addiction problems and what to do about them, according to experts and recent surveys.
A survey of human-relations officers at U.S. firms showed that more than half did not know how to identify an addiction-related problem, more than one-third did not know how to get treatment for addicted workers and one-quarter said their companies view firing someone as preferable to getting them help.
"We've had companies tell us that addiction isn't their problem, so why bother," said William C. Moyers, a spokesman for the Hazelden Foundation, a Minnesota-based addiction research organization, which carried out the survey.
One problem, he said, is that the image of an alcoholic or addict doesn't match reality. And Moyers, son of well-known author and television personality Bill Moyers, points to himself as an example of this.
"When somebody like me has a problem, people dismiss it because they can't imagine that somebody of my reputation or last name could have the problem," said Moyers, a recovering addict. His addiction reached a peak a decade ago when he was a journalist with CNN.
At the recent meeting of the Northern Illinois Employee Assistance Professionals Association, where Poznanovich delivered his speech on the silent conspiracy, the message had a strong resonance with some. Bill Heffernan, co-president of Employee Resources System Inc., a Chicago-based company, thought of the employers he has encountered who do not want to deal with addicted workers.
"I hear it all the time. I see it all the time. And it drives me wild," Heffernan said. "People say, `I have an employee who is a drug addict and I'm waiting for him to get caught in the drug test.' I say, `If you have a problem deal with it.'"
Job on the line
Experts say workplace interventions can be effective, adding that it often makes a difference if the person in crisis realizes that they can be fired if they don't begin treatment. "I've never had a person refuse treatment if his job was on the line," said Marguerite Phelps, a Chicago-area drug and alcohol counselor who has carried out interventions for a number of years.
An intervention is a difficult, time-consuming and emotionally wrenching process, explained Dr. Joseph Flaherty, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago at Illinois. It is something, he said, that requires a special expertise.
"I frequently get calls from physicians' families. They call me because they want to know what they should do. And when I say intervention, they say, `How can we do it?' Most people, left on their own, just don't know what to do," he said.
In Poznanovich's case, he didn't know what to do, and neither did those close to him. He was in his mid-30s and owned the Gold Coast condo of his dreams. In the late 1980s, he had come far from the small bungalows in Chicago's far southeast neighborhoods, where he grew up, and he was on his way to a $200,000-a-year-plus salary.
He also had avoided drinking because it had been a problem in his family and in the old neighborhood. But at a party full of rich, attractive people, everything changed. "There were a lot of people I wanted to be with. They were doing it--coke--and I said if they are doing it, then it must be OK," he said.
Caught up in cocaine
He began with a $50-a-week habit, which grew to a $200-a-week habit and kept on growing. He started doing coke daily--with employees after work, away from the job or by himself on business trips. Because he was snorting coke, he didn't think he would develop the physical signs of a user.
Chip Dempsey, a friend from Bradley University in Peoria, and a sales manager under Poznanovich at Zenith, thought he was doing his friend a favor by covering up and sticking up for him at work.
"I didn't get it," Dempsey said. "I didn't realize that the way to deal with people like him is that you are straight with them." There were others at the company who saw the same worrying signs, "But they took no action, nothing at all," Dempsey said.
When the company let Poznanovich go in a round of job cuts in late 1992, he withdrew to his condo, and his addiction. Sick, nearly broke, and his engagement washed up, he turned to his mother in February 1995. She scraped up money for him to go to a treatment center.
He did well and started on a new sales career. But soon he had another problem: He was addicted to food. After gaining 130 pounds, he went in 2001 to a treatment for people addicted to food. Going through recovery once again, he decided that this time when he went back into the business world he would do something that uses his addiction experiences.
With $5,000 and a partner, who is also a recovering addict, he created his company in St. Paul in 2002. Two years later it is an 11-person company with offices in Chicago, New York, Boston and Charlotte, booming revenues and expansion plans. The goal, he said, is to become the only company offering consulting and crisis-intervention services nationwide for people with addiction problems.
Drug, alcohol problems at work
77 Percent of the 12.3 million illicit drug users in the United States are employed.
6.5 Estimated percentage of total full-time workers using illicit drugs.
19 Percentage of food-preparation workers, waiters and bartenders who reported using illicit drugs or drinking heavily, making it the occupation with highest rate of use. Construction workers were second at 14 percent.
60 Percentage of adults said they knew someone who has reported for work under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune
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