FORT BRAGG, N.C. – A mixture of combat uniformed personnel and civilians circled the conference room with one common purpose, ensuring substance abuse prevention policies are adhered throughout the installation.
The Fort Bragg Army Substance Abuse Prevention Program held the first quarterly battalion prevention leaders meeting of the new year, Jan. 19.
According to Army Regulation 600-85, substance abuse contributes to high-risk behaviors, runs counter to the Army Values and erodes personal readiness. When administered appropriately, through engaged and empowered leadership, ASAP supports building personal readiness, resilience and optimizes performance.
It’s a well-known fact that, by regulation, each army unit must have a unit prevention leader. UPLs are responsible in employing random drug testing that varies frequency and periodicity. They also ensure that annual training in education of substance abuse is completed and know what and how to refer to available substance abuse resources.
However, battalion prevention leaders are less well known. They are the battalion commander’s subject matter experts on ASAP who meet the same criteria as an UPL, but BPLs are also responsible in providing supervision, understanding inspection requirements, and providing technical guidance to UPLs.
BPLs are a requirement by Army regulation, but Fort Bragg lacked the support needed to meet the standard, possibly due to the high turnover rate for many installation units – which caused difficulties in keeping BPLs in their positions. To counter this issue, Fort Bragg ASAP, with the support of the installation and senior command leadership, focused their priority on requiring every battalion to have a BPL. As a result, quarterly meetings of the BPLs also developed and grew.
An additional measure taken to ensure policy is followed, the Fort Bragg Drug Testing Center conducts quarterly inspections of BPLs to ensure battalions are random testing and are keeping the required documents needed according to regulation.
Each month ASAP is required to look at testing stats of all units on Fort Bragg. They look at end strength to determine the number of random tests required each month. This also helps determine a threshold of testing compliance to allow some room for situations that prevent testing (i.e. temporary duty assignments). BPL’s hold the key to accurate reporting of testing numbers.
Properly backfilling BPLs due to deployments or permanent change of station moves, any issues that battalions have and need ASAP, or senior leader, attention, results on inspections, and any other resources that BPLs may need are other subjects discussed during the quarterly meetings. This also allows for one-on-one mentorship between prevention leaders and ASAP personnel.
“I’m convinced that when we find a solid battle rhythm to keep BPLs in place and they do their jobs professionally and effectively, we will have one of the best drug testing programs in the Army,” said Melvin Nowling, Fort Bragg Army Substance Abuse Program prevention chief.
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