Is Your Company Drug-Ridden?

An upset tow owner confided his company was drug-ridden and he didn’t know what to do about it. That’s an easy one—clean house. If your company has a drug problem, you (as owner) play Russian roulette with your livelihood, assets, reputation and everything you’ve worked for. In this age of vicarious liability … you’d best be taking all precautions necessary to ensure your company’s not drug- or alcohol-infested.

Driver behaviors are evident and symptoms easy to spot if you’re intent on watching. Along with activities of personal use, you need to be wary of drivers who sell drugs from your trucks.A Florida tower allegedly “butt dialed” 9-1-1 where police dispatchers listened in. When the call ended, dispatchers located the tow truck using the cellphone’s GPS. A sheriff’s deputy stopped the tow truck and questioned the driver about his conversation with his passengers. Deputies allegedly found a crack pipe on the driver and arrested and charged him with possession of drug paraphernalia.Drivers who feel they aren’t paid enough sometimes go into their own business by selling drugs out of your tow truck. Does your company use dispatch software that’s GPS-capable of monitoring where your trucks are at all times? When a driver’s 115 miles away from your shop on a non-determined errand or “who knows?” mission, ask yourself, “What’re they doing with my tow truck?”Policy should prohibit visitors coming to your shop on weekends and afterhours as this too is a behavior of drug sales. Additionally, some strung-out individuals tend to have a greater need to support their habit. Because tow companies tend to have release money, paid invoices, or auction proceeds on-site, they become easy victims of robbery.With all the potential nooks and crannies where stash can be secreted within the truck’s interiors and side boxes, it can be easy for a driver/drug dealer to fly under the radar. If they’re arrested in your truck, they go to jail and your company’s truck goes to impound, somewhere around the same time the local news flashes a picture of your truck’s door for all the world to see.Don’t be afraid to terminate for what you believe may be drug or narcotics sales. Where the ultimate damage to your company is loss of reputation, your company is better off to rid itself of a potential drug seller, even if it means fighting a claim against you for wrongful termination. But, as in any wrongful-termination scenario, the key is documentation to the extreme.If you’ve kept an accurate, factual, or provable accounting of alleged sales or use activities, there should be no wrongful termination, but termination for founded cause. One company made a bold effort to clean out employees who were provably using within the company. Their termination resulted in an increase in employee motivation and driver morale with a decline in thefts within the yard … all for the better. Perhaps a justifiable house cleaning is in your company’s future?