“If I’m supervising 10 guys, two or three will be using almost every day,” said Mr. St. Cyr, who is 57 years old and in recovery from his own opioid addiction. He’s quick to notice users’ pinprick eyes and their jaundiced skin.
Opioid use, and deaths from overdoses, has jumped across North America during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December said the U.S. will record 81,230 fatal drug deaths in the 12 months through May, a record, up from 68,829 deaths during the same period ending in May 2019. In Canada, opioid overdose deaths hit 1,628 in the second quarter, from 1,029 in the first, as the pandemic took hold.
The construction industry, already facing a shortage of manual labor, has been hit particularly hard. Bricklayers, carpenters and laborers carry heavy loads and perform the same tasks day in and day out, leading to injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, strained shoulders and bad backs. Seeking relief, workers can get hooked on strong prescription drugs such as fentanyl, oxycodone and morphine, and street drugs like heroin.
“There are higher levels of pain in construction than in other industries,” said Vicky Waldron, executive director for the Vancouver-based Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan, a nonprofit set up by labor unions and construction companies for drug treatment.
In a 2019 report by Barclays Research that examined data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the bank’s analysts said that opioid use in the U.S. has made workers in the industry less productive and has increased costs to the industry. While the precise number of overdose deaths in the North American construction industry is hard to determine, the workers are roughly 6 times more likely than workers in other manufacturing industrial and services industries to become addicted to opioids, according to the report.
In the Canadian province of British Columbia, long the epicenter of Canada’s drug crisis and the site of an immigration-driven building boom that transformed the skyline of Vancouver, more than one-fifth of all overdose deaths between 2011 and 2016 involved construction workers, according to Statistics Canada.
These days, the risk of addiction has only grown amid the isolation and limited access to support clinics amid Covid-19 restrictions, health advocates and researchers say.
Those unable to work because of the Covid lockdowns are especially vulnerable, Ms. Waldron said. In April, early in the pandemic, her nonprofit saw a 47% increase in calls from distressed users, while the number of workers currently registered in the program is at the highest levels in at least four years, she said.
“It’s the busiest we’ve ever been,” Ms. Waldron said.
Apart from the toll of addiction on the users, losing workers to opioid use is adding to an existing shortage in the industry. According to a fourth-quarter survey of the commercial construction industry by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 83% of contractors reported having difficulty finding skilled workers. Of those companies, nearly 40% turned down work because they don’t have enough workers.
The costs add up. A worker with a substance-use disorder costs companies $4,700 per worker yearly on average in health-care costs, according to the National Safety Council. That’s 62% more than the $2,900 estimated health-care cost for nonusers.
Some industry groups, such as the Pennsylvania-based Keystone Contractors Association, are stepping up efforts to tackle the problem. The association joined in 2018 with the National Safety Council to create educational materials for companies to teach workers about the dangers of prescription painkillers and drug use. The groups also persuaded the state legislature to declare the last week of July “Construction Opioids Awareness Week.”
Other treatment and rehabilitation programs are being led by unions, such as John Anderson’s local.
Mr. Anderson, a 28-year-old elevator mechanic who works in New York City, became addicted to Percocet and OxyContin when he started his first construction job framing houses at 19 years of age. He found that he could get more work done when he was high and unable to feel the strain of the job.
“I was doing my thing, doing my work, and life didn’t become a mess,” he said. “It was no harm, no foul.”
Eventually, however, he found he couldn’t even get to work without the drugs and spent almost all his money on the pills. When those became too expensive or difficult to find, he switched to heroin.
The heroin use led to arrests, lapses at work, and several stints in rehabilitation facilities. Finally, he turned to his union, Local One of the New York and New Jersey chapter of the International Union of Elevator Constructors, which had just started a recovery and treatment program for members. He has now been clean for three years.
“I needed help,” he said. “I didn’t know how to be a sober man.”
The elevator union has a full-time person on staff to help coordinate recovery and education efforts for members and their families. Brendan Loftus, himself a recovering alcoholic, started the program in 2016 after he went to his fifth funeral for a colleague who overdosed on opioids. He said the drug toll was being ignored.
“If you had five guys die in the field from other accidents, people would have been up in arms,” he said.
Mr. Loftus now offers members an assistance program that refers them to rehabilitation facilities and tracks their progress. The members are regularly tested and offered counseling. Mr. Loftus said the program, along with mandatory education sessions about opioids, has boosted the recovery success rate—defined as a person who has stayed clean for a year or more—to 80% from under 10% when he first started. Since 2016, it has treated roughly 100 members.
Lisa Ulbrich, a vice president for Commodore Builders, a general contracting company in Waltham, Mass., in September 2019 began a program for the company’s 170 employees. It provides treatment placement, counseling, education and recovery support for substance users and their families. In August 2020, the company expanded it to include more than 500 workers employed by the subcontractors working on Commodore’s job sites.
Ms. Ulbrich, who herself is in recovery from alcoholism, said companies aren’t thinking enough about treating their workers. Many contractors deal with the issue by putting naloxone, a drug that can revive overdosed users, on site, a sign they are focused on short-term fixes for a long-term health crisis.
In Massachusetts, where the construction industry employs almost 145,000 people, or roughly 4% of the state’s workforce, construction workers comprised almost 25% of all opioid overdose deaths between 2011 and 2015, according to the state’s Department of Public Health.
“Everybody was recognizing that we have a major problem here,” Ms. Ulbrich said. “But what were we doing to stop the cycle?”