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

From the Midwest originally. I moved to the Bay Area in the mid-2000s for work right out of college. As a young teen, I had gotten most drug use and experimentation out of my system. Marijuana and LSD were my mainstays then. In my later teens called it quits when I realized grades matter.

Fast-forward to moving to Bay Area, I was astounded by the level of cavalier toking up, dosing, or snorting that folks my age and well into their 40s were doing. None of this was typical at the office, but afterwards yes. Never condoned by the Big Company. The folks who did it in the office were known, but they were never fired or pushed out — even though the 2007 financial crisis was underway and everyone was tightening belts. The worst I saw in the office was a poor guy who had a vat of raw powdered caffeine that he continually ingested due to his sleep apnea.

Outside the office, damn, was there plenty of abuse within the Burning Man and Oakland scenes. Many were professionals, but they were wrecks. All said they were fine, but you could see that a manager East of the Bay Area would have fried their sorry asses in a heartbeat. To this date, two have died from drug related complications and three have wasted their bodies on MDMA, Speed, and other cosmetic drugs. Shocking to see someone earning North of 250k/year snorting MDA with a rusty razor blade.

I moved to Berlin in the intervening years. Everything was tame there in comparison. Just a bunch of low-grade speed masquerading as something better. The folks there who do this match what you would expect: poor mental acumen and lack of patience in the office, and they were everywhere. Alcoholism was especially rampant: I think the dark depressing den of winter there drives folks to it.

Since going back to the Bay Area, most of the folks have slowed down or moved away. So many broken marriages, careers, and bodies. Reminds me of the epilogue scene of A Scanner Darkly.

Where to start.

Living in and growing up in Amsterdam has exposed me to more drug use than I care to remember. It's pretty ugly when you see super smart people slowly slide down and eventually enter a period of rapid decline and eventual death.

A few escaped the latter fate but they'll never be the same people. They serve as very real life reminders for me to never ever even try that stuff.

Some of the ones that died left behind wives and kids, some of them only kids because they were single parents. It's terrible to see this sort of thing up close and to realize there isn't anything that you can do about it without at least a minimum of cooperation from the other party.

I've seen businesses - good businesses - go under because of drug use, I've seen partnerships go South because of it.

From what I've seen up close cocaine seems to be the hard drug of choice for the tech scene in NL, it's not nearly as wide-spread as the media would have you believe but it is a lot larger than what I'm comfortable with and I am always on the lookout for the signs when evaluating companies.

I live and work in Berlin for years now, working in startups, and I haven't met anybody that (openly) uses anything harder than tobacco or coffee, nor I met anybody who said they knew somebody to do that.

Beer is common after work, once in a while. However, what you describe is definitively not normal. Not that I find that problem, or high-risk, or anything - it's just the fact that it would just surely catch attention if anybody from my work environment (30+ close coworkers) notice somebody like you're describing.

> I remember a CEO of one of my early startups would give me 5mg addies to help me get more done.

That person ought to be in jail. A CEO is definitely not in charge of the pharmacy, anything of this kind should be prescribed by your doctor.

I have never known anyone I have worked with to do drugs (in order to aid work). Doesn't mean they don't, but I hadn't even thought about it until I read this post. One of the first things I learned in my (albeit young) career is that my brilliant, complex, I-worked-all-night-to-make-this super code is total garbage that no one wants to work with. Yes, it's amazing, but if no one else can understand it or wants to, it's dead in the water.

Making code simpler is more important, being reliable and sustaining a constantly improving level of code quality is pure gold. This will allow my team to be more productive, we will get better quality products out faster and be able to build upon them. I think my natural mind is best suited for the complex demands required by collaborating with others, thinking deeply, and turning thoughts into clear, clean, testable and tested code.

Far from wanting to stimulate myself to work more, I'd love to be able to turn my mind off and relax more quickly, and get a good nights sleep to start again refreshed. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of coders had a little alcohol in the evenings, maybe marijuana. The coders I know drink a little (not too much) and one of them smokes weed. That's it.

I agree with other comments that I think people self-select into different groups. There are people that take drugs. They hang out with people that take drugs. Maybe some of them have gotten into coding. There are a lot of people who don't take drugs, and they usually work with similar people. I don't think this is a coding vs non-coding thing, but maybe what type of person you turned out to be in high school. I'd bet most coders aren't the drug-taking type.