Bar Staff Are on the Front Lines of the Opioid Epidemic. But Who Is There to Support Them?

Benjamin Diepholz has been in the bar and restaurant industry on and off for 18 years. For the past three years, he’s worked at a kava bar in Asheville, North Carolina, and in previous roles, he’s designed menus, made 20-30 gallons of soup at a time, and tended bar working a dozen drinks deep. But nothing prepared him for what happened this September. 

One day that month, two men entered the bar. One asked for a cup of water. As Diepholz stepped outside for a cigarette, he peered in and saw one of the two men slumped over some books, snoring. Diepholz has struggled with substance use in the past, and has carried Narcan for years. He jumped into action: He approached the two men, explained what the Narcan did, administered it, and counted to 10. When the snoring man didn’t wake up, he called an ambulance, and emergency responders arrived within minutes. “I saw the emergency workers helping him with urgency, and then that urgency kind of left,” he says. “They slowly put him in the ambulance and drove away without the lights on.”

It was obvious that the customer had died in the bar, even after Diepholz’s best attempts to save his life. Diepholz kept the incident to himself for about a week, and talked to his therapist about it. He says that there is still a big stigma around substance dependency within the hospitality industry that impacts how staff are trained to respond when overdoses happen at work. “We’re taught to deal with the stress of being in the weeds, but when someone really needs help, we freeze,” he says.

If hospitality workers are tasked with navigating these traumatic events, who is there to support them?