Life, liberty, and the pursuit of a good beer: how the ADA has turned alcoholism into a right.

• Author: Olson, Walter K.
• Position: Americans with Disabilities Act - Excerpt from 'The Excuse Factory'

On March 9, 1990, Northwest pilot Norman Lyle Prouse saw, as he later put it, "the end of my career ahead of me." The previous evening, an anonymous tipster had called the local Federal Aviation Administration office to report that Prouse and his crew were tossing back drink after drink at the Speak Easy lounge in Fargo, Minnesota -- even though they were scheduled to fly a plane to Minneapolis at 6:30 the following morning. The FAA's "bottle-to-throttle" rule prohibits drinking within eight hours of take-off, so when they arrived at the airport, the men were met by an FAA inspector. The inspector was concerned by their bloodshot eyes and alcoholic breath -- not to mention the deep gash on Prouse's forehead. But the inspector mistakenly believed he lacked the authority to stop the crew from flying the plane, a Boeing 727 with 58 passengers on board. Prouse took off in sleet and rain and landed in Minneapolis three hours later without incident. There the crew was met by more investigators who conducted blood tests. The crew swore they had had only a few drinks the night before and left the bar by 8:30 at the latest. But lab tests proved otherwise. Prouse had a blood level of .13 percent -- higher than both the FAA's .04 limit for pilots and the 10 level Minnesota uses to define drunk driving. It turned out that Prouse had not left the bar until 11:30, by which time he had knocked off between 15 and 19 rum and cokes and fallen off his chair and cut his head. Prouse, you see, was an alcoholic.

Prouse immediately entered rehab and hired a lawyer. The aviation press was incensed at the many rationalizations offered in Prouse's defense -- particularly the argument that, after all, he had landed the plane safely. They had a point. After all, the true test of safety in the air is not whether you can manage the long boring stretches, but whether you're ready for the unexpected. The judge was equally unimpressed with Prouse's arguments and sentenced him to more than a year in prison.

But Prouse's pessimism about his career prospects proved unwarranted. That's because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects alcoholics who enter rehab. Although Northwest could have tried to take shelter under an exception, it chose to bow to the spirit of the law. Northwest rehired Prouse as soon as he was released from jail. And in July 1995 the company quietly confirmed that Prouse had returned to flying passenger jets.

The First Sip

How, exactly, did alcoholism emerge as a protected category in the American workplace, akin to race, sex, or religion? The most powerful force pushing in that direction has been the rise of the disability-rights movement, which culminated in Congress's near-unanimous passage of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. But the story is in fact more complicated. Long before ADA or its predecessor statute in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 came along, managers in civil service systems were finding it a headache to handle employees who hit the sauce. The same was often true for private-industry managers who dealt with powerful labor unions. In both cases, the reigning principle of tenure -- that workers, once ensconced in their jobs, should not have to worry about losing their jobs unless they engaged in truly lurid misconduct -- had gone far to entrench alcoholic workers against removal for poor performance, absenteeism, or attitude problems.

Modern civil service procedures and the arbitration systems commonly found in unionized workplaces afford a striking degree of protection to the worker with a drinking problem. One crucial premise commonly adopted is that management must prove a case for removing a worker...