Despite overcoming addictions from alcohol and other drugs, recovering individuals are often passed over for jobs because companies see relapse as a problem, the Christian Science Monitor reported June 4.Georgia Evans, who is recovering from a 13-month crack addiction, has been turned down three times for jobs she was more than qualified to perform. In all three job interviews, she was up-front about her recovery.
"A lot of people fear people in treatment. They think we're all thieves or something," she said. "If anything, it's taught me that whatever you do, you try to do your best."
As more states are turning to treatment rather than prison, a national movement is growing to fight the kind of discrimination that millions of people like Evans face each day.
Even though the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination against people in recovery, experts in treatment and recovery estimate that when recovering addicts are honest about drug histories, they will get turned down for a job 75 percent of the time.
"Hope for the future is what keeps people in recovery, and blatant and systematic discrimination destroys that hope," said former CNN anchor Susan Rook, a recovering addict who's now a treatment advocate. "Recovery is scary, painful, frustrating, and then, after doing that, we are punished for the best thing that we've ever done, then how in the world can you make an argument to the next person you're trying to convince to give recovery a try?"
Advocacy groups said that discrimination remains widespread because even with the ADA protection, very few recovering addicts want to fight employers in court. In addition, many companies have stereotypes about people in recovery, mainly because relapse rates are high. According to a recent survey of people in recovery, 46 percent had relapsed, and of those, 30 percent had relapsed more than once.
"If one does hire someone like this, it becomes a personal matter, and one has to take more effort watching and supervising that person. It is possible to do," said a New York employer who preferred not to be named. "But if one has a choice between a person who's been addicted and one who's not, one would go for the person who's not addicted."
Recovery advocates point out that companies, which are concerned about stability on the job, have a hard time understanding that relapse is part of the healing process. "When people who aren't familiar with the process see the drug addict have a relapse, they think: 'They're just drug addicts, they're one and the same, they go back to their drugs,' " said Peter Provet, president of Odyssey House, a drug-treatment facility in New York. "That perpetuates that negative stereotype that is dominating the public."
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