Preparing to interview: Someone in recovery from substance use

The rails What you may not ask

Are you in treatment or recovery? Treatment history is a disability inquiry and is off limits before a conditional offer.
What medications do you take? Prescribed treatment medication, including buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone, is protected under the ADA (EEOC, 2020).
Anything that turns a routine drug screen into a medical conversation with an interviewer. Results route through a medical review officer, not through you.

The rails What you may ask

Whether the candidate can perform the essential functions of the job, with or without a reasonable accommodation.
Current illegal drug use, which is not protected.
Attendance, reliability, and performance expectations, applied identically to everyone.

General information for interview preparation as of August 2026, not legal advice. Your employment counsel owns your policies.

Avoid this The mistake most employers make

A drug-testing policy that automatically fails anyone on prescribed medication-assisted treatment. This is the most common quiet failure in recovery-friendly employment nationally: it punishes exactly the people whose recovery is most stable and best supervised, and it is the fact pattern most likely to produce the ADA claim you feared. Audit your policy against your MRO process before it fires, not after.

Instead What actually predicts performance

The same structured interview that predicts for everyone. Recovery status tells you nothing about job performance and you are not entitled to it. Attendance and performance standards, applied uniformly, are both lawful and sufficient.

Build the interview that does this

Worth knowing The evidence

Contact with people in recovery reduces stigma more effectively than education alone (Corrigan 2012; Livingston 2012), which is why IHC delivers this as brief in-person remarks at employer events rather than as a course.

What is actually available to you

Wellness Council of Indiana holds the state's Recovery Friendly Workplace designation. That is the front door, and it is a process rather than a check.
Recovery Works (Indiana DMHA) funds treatment for justice-involved candidates, which stabilizes the hire.
Federal Bonding applies here too.

Both chairs Practice the moment

Read their chair The season you got well “If I say the word recovery, they will hear the word relapse.” Open → Practice yours Your side of the fear “If this goes wrong, I am the one who vouched. Everyone will remember whose idea it was.” Open →

Reading the other chair is the fastest empathy training available, and it is free.

Before you move on: one if-then

Before my next hire starts, when I would normally just run the standard drug screen,

I will… pick one or write your own

Stays on your device. Never sent to us. See all your commitments →

Naming a specific if-then plan improves follow-through by a medium-to-large margin over holding the same goal without one (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes, 2006; update Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, 2024).