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Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

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Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#191

Post by genemachinery »

Can opiate addiction be better understood by young people by comparing it to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in sports? Crime in football players may be related to TBI. Both Alzheimer's and TBI patients share Delta FosB peptides. https://www.statnews.com/2017/12/07/traumatic-brain-injury-c... ​ Delta FosB protein is seen in epileptics, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), addicts and Alzheimer's brains. US football and NHL hockey teams too? ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB ​ Can NIH work with Genspace in NYC? They teach neurohacking. https://www.genspace.org/​ Can students learn the effects of aging, trauma and addiction via computer simulations? Can they develop a Brain for Blender TBI model? Showing brain injury? ​See attached file brain_TBI_simulator.txt showing brain injury and cell_TBI_simulator.txt capturing TBI. ​ ​New Mexico went from 100 women at Grants Correctional in 1990, today it is over 600. Opiate and meth addiction is ripping many communities apart. Biology education in NM is basic. https://www.amazon.com/Pastoral-Clinic-Addiction-Dispossessi...

Many families in NM are broken. When drugs remove women the society breaks down. ​My wife sees released women inmates and their children living out of cars at Santa Fe Community College. We volunteer at the Santa Fe Interfaith Homeless Shelter with addicts to feed and house them. I worked with AIDS patients in Jamaica, WI in US Peace Corps and alcoholic students in Gallup UNM. AIDS patients suffer brain issues as the disease progresses. I also work training women in IT in summer internships at the State of NM. Many work in NM. I completed a thesis on DNA shotgun sequencing at the US Human Genome Project at Los Alamos National Lab. I graduated with MS CS at NM Tech while at LANL.

​My son is now a senior in Chemical/Biomedical engineering at CSU, Fort Collins building Alzheimer's, TBI, and addiction models using neural nets/machine learning. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A?app... Unfortunately there are no Chemical/Biomedical Engineering BS programs in New Mexico? My son has studied the Chinese language. How do we stop importation of Fentanyl from China?​ https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/24/china-fentanyl-usps/​ Delta FosB protein is seen in epileptics, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), addicts and Alzheimer's brains. US football and NHL hockey teams too? ​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB ​ Could a plastic contact lens absorb Delta FosB? Could Korean contact lens be used to monitor Delta Fosb in addicts? A lower amount could mean effective drug addiction treatment? Could you develop a contact lens sensor for Delta FosB? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/01/25/th...

Delta FosB may be detected in eyes via contact lens? Cheaper than MRI. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/article-a... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11006248

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#193

Post by coldtea »

vkou wrote: post #109
coldtea wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who use a lot of stimulants tend to love talking about themselves As opposed to people who don't?

I generally love talking about myself, but I don't love talking about how I had a glass of cab last night, and how I can't wait to get home and have another.

No, but non-drug-using people also love to talk about their abstinence, teetotalism, vegetarianism, healthy lifestyle, Jesus, and so on...

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#194

Post by Hooke »

Eilene wrote: post #68
hprotagonist wrote: post #50

In no particular order: the use of caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, adderall, and modafinil are absolutely rife in the academic research world. Postdocs and young faculty, in particular.

For all the same reasons it's used in tech--to enhance productivity? are junior faculty and post docs overworked or are the hours required of them kind of insane too?

I'm a junior academic, recently a postdoc, and I saw a little bit of ADHD stimulant use among peers, and the increasing popularity of modafanil. Basically just due to publication pressure; in my field assistant professors at a top flight university have to write not one but two peer reviewed books to get tenure. Others go in an orthogonal direction and get obsessed with intense exercise routines, also with the aim of increasing those ~six hours of usable cognitive time per day.

MDMA and cannabis are both quite popular and talked about openly but I think that's more a general reflection of the culture in places like NYC and the Bay Area, where I have personal experience.

Good luck with the book by the way. One word of warning: please try very hard to avoid falling into a simplistic narrative that will contribute to drug prohibition. Criminalization of drugs has, IMO, ruined far more lives than drugs themselves. A former Columbia colleague, Carl Hart, professor in the psych department, has written a lot on this and might be worthwhile as an interview subject for your book. Personally I think he sometimes pushes too far in the opposite direction, but he is nevertheless an important public voice speaking up against decades of scaremongering.

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#195

Post by testvox »

mitjak wrote: post #105
Blahah wrote: post #42

I am open to discussing this in raw detail - contact in my profile. Most programmers, scientists, people in finance and startups I know take a lot of stimulants. I take a lot of stimulants. [Edit - as others have pointed out, there's a strong selection bias going on here. I actively seek out people who I know take stimulants, and we naturally congregate socially based on a bunch of subtle and explicit cues that signa…

This is, subjectively, absolutely insane to me. In your experience do people have an easy time going off these substances?

Keep in mind the therapeutic dose people take to focus better is an order of magnitude lower then the dose people take for recreation.

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#196

Post by whalesalad »

Eilene wrote: post #52
whalesalad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went cold turkey because I did not like the fact that I needed the drug to go about my day. I also started to get into crossfit/fitness and the really high dose stimulants made intense exercise feel like it was taxing my body way more than it should have. I wanted to achieve everything naturally. I knew going off the drug would slow me down, but I was willing to trade general health and well-being for a drop in pro…

Do you ever feel like everyone around you is doing some substance to make them work faster or better, and that you'll somehow fall behind or be at a professional disadvantage if yo don't?

I felt that sense while I was down in the dumps after going cold turkey ... but now that I have more of a grasp on my life (married, dog, money in savings, living a healthy lifestyle, etc...) I no longer feel that way.

I don't live in Silicon Valley any longer though... so that might be part of the reason I don't feel the pressure.

Right now I might call myself a big fish in a little pond (not really, I am more humble than that) but compared to SF where you are a small fish in a big pond ... there is a lot more pressure to stand-out and be excellent.

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#197

Post by ggg9990 »

Blahah wrote: post #42

I am open to discussing this in raw detail - contact in my profile. Most programmers, scientists, people in finance and startups I know take a lot of stimulants. I take a lot of stimulants. [Edit - as others have pointed out, there's a strong selection bias going on here. I actively seek out people who I know take stimulants, and we naturally congregate socially based on a bunch of subtle and explicit cues that signa…

Wow, a great view into how two people can live probably yards from each other and live in what are functionally two distinct planets.

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#198

Post by ThrustVectoring »

Bartweiss wrote: post #166
Eilene wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this manager still going this route? And do you think any of the microdosing (or other drug use) goes beyond the 10x productivity stuff? Could it be some of the tedium of programming work? Does it relieve any of that? I'm trying to determine too if all of the drug use in tech is really aimed at enhancing performance/productivity or if it's also used to stave off depression, anxiety or just that feeling so many of…

> I'm trying to determine too if all of the drug use in tech is really aimed at enhancing performance/productivity or if it's also used to stave off depression, anxiety or just that feeling so many of us have and have had that we're not doing anything particularly meaningful in our professional work. This is a fascinating possibility, and apparently there's at least one researcher working on exactly that. [1][2] On a…

The emotional blocks to productivity are a very real phenomenon. I've only ever done this once, but I pushed through a really annoying emberjs refactor through Ballmer Peaking overnight.

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#199

Post by deadmetheny »

Eilene wrote: post #87
logfromblammo wrote: post #81

The only drugs I have observed personally are caffeine, nicotine, refined sugar, and ethanol. The only other drugs I have heard about or suspected are prescription drugs for diagnosed medical conditions, such as hypertension, pre-diabetes, and high cholesterol. But people around here would tend to keep even the legal drugs out of public knowledge, as that sort of thing may affect background checks and security cleara…

Does anyone else want to weigh in about geographical differences in the use of drugs or the perception of those who do? It's very interesting to me how different your experience is from those, say, in the Bay Area or in big coastal cities.

As a Midwesterner, I can echo the sentiment that those who use illegal drugs are generally considered to be lowlifes or otherwise looked down upon by older folks, and some younger ones. Cannabis use is something of an exception - it's seen as acceptable by most of the younger crowd and more of the older folks are being convinced it's not dangerous as well. Legal drugs are a-ok.

For tech specifically, in my experience there seems to be a higher-than-average number of smokers. Coffee and soda are drank as if they were water. That's about it.

Re: Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector

#200

Post by jfv »

Drug abuse is not a big issue in SV in general. There are a few general themes:

1) Some startups have a heavy-drinking bro-y environment.

2) Weed is common outside of work (in all of SF)

3) As part of the burning man culture a lot of people will occasionally let loose all weekend with molly, LSD, shrooms, and anything else you’d expect at BM

4) Some people will use adderall/modanfil to stay productive during work.

5) People in SV are willing to try new, untested drugs more than in any other culture I’ve seen, besides MIT.

In summary, I never expect to see someone jonesing in SV. It’s overall a responsible drug culture, not like what I’ve seen with my medical/finance friends. In NY it’s not uncommon to hear ‘I need some coke’ but I never got that sense in SV.

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