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

I am a software developer based in London, UK who uses several stimulants / drugs in my day-to-day work, I also understand that I am the exception to the rule and whilst I do use a number of substances for many reasons, there are very few of my colleagues that do the same - in fact I have very few colleagues that I work closely with anyway.

To give you some context - I work for a financial group and mostly work on software to aid their day to day workflows. The simplest terms I can put it in is that I give a lot of rich city boys the tools to make them a lot of money and in return they pay me what I consider to be an obscene salary. I spend most of my days in the basement of one of those buildings in the city, in a small office, pretty much alone with headphones on and sometimes going days without actually talking to people. I like it.

I am diagnosed with ADHD which is not as commonly diagnosed in adults in the UK ( but becoming more commonly reconsised ) - for that I take methylphenidate ( commonly known as Ritalin in the US ) and that helps immensely with focus. I also vape cannabis regularly that also helps with the focus as my dose wears off. Sometimes, for those long weekend sessions of coding, I will use LSD.

The effects are - I dont have to loathe myself whilst doing my job. In all honesty, I hate my job and the people I work for, but at the same time, I got bills to pay and want to retire at a younger age than most. I also find that the drugs make me zone-in on a task and I am just able to get it done quicker. I write significantly better code high, than not.

I'd love to have a story for you, but in all honesty my life is pretty boring beyond the fact that some of the stuff I have to do is questionable, especially for those people who might be using online trading software.

Other than that, picture a guy, standing ( yeah, im one of those standing desk people ) in a small, fairly dimly lit office in the basement of a multi-billion pound financial bohemoth, with headphones on blasting some music whilst bashing away at a keyboard and thats pretty much my life.

I've been in IT for years, but before that I was in the military, saw combat, and developed PTSD. IT is just one of the things I'm good at that pays the bills, but that alone wouldn't tell you my story of drugs.

I got out and immediately used my GI bill to go to uni. I was drinking a lot at the time though. I got up to about a fifth every two days. This was for a lot of reasons. The transition from infantry to civilian life so quickly was rough. I was the oldest person in most of my classes of smartass 18 year old rich kids who mommy and daddy paid their way to college and bought them vehicles etc. I became bitter about the war and started researching it further and fell further into disgust because I realized how much of it was a lie. I made some ROTC cadets cry because I snapped when I saw them doing a "patrol" on campus with poor dispersion and yelled at them. I failed out of a math class... things were generally not headed in a good direction.

Then the tables turned, and it was all thanks to cannabis. See, I was always brought up anti-drug, so I was one of the few outliers who literally never did drugs in high-school of any sort other than alcohol and caffeine. As part of my military goals of getting and maintain clearance I also was very strict with myself about drugs, always feeling contempt and disgust for those who particpated in them. (not realizing the hypocricy and double-standard when it came to tobacco and alcohol).

So it wasn't until after two semesters of this downward spiral that a friend pulled me into his room, and said he wanted to talk to me about cannabis. He said he knew my position, but that being scientific minded I should read up on the scientific facts known about it and then read some first hand experience articles from a place called erowid. After a few weeks of reading every scientific paper I could get my hands on, and reading a few erowid posts from other PTSD military types, I finally decided I was a civilian now, I could give it a shot.

Cannabis literally saved me from becoming (or staying) an alcoholic. It was an almost instant turn around. I found being drunk disgusting. I stopped smoking tobacco completely. (Smoked a pack of cigs a day in-country, quit cold turkey when I left Iraq for the last time, but continued to smoke cigars/pipe tobacco every once in a while.) I found myself able to process things better. I was getting sleep I had before had to be drunk to get (hypervigilance is a bitch). I was being nicer to other students and not as standoffish, and started making friends.

I eventually quit college to do a startup that I left a few years later but that is still going strong. I stayed in the industry and have been in IT since. This sounds like a success story right? That's not all.

What I didn't tell you was I lived in the bible belt, in a state where it was/is illegal. I started having issues with the demographic... that is to say the people. I started having issues despite fairly regularly smoking cannabis, and started drinking again at the same time (cross-fading). I eventually got so fed up with the area I was in I jumped ship and moved to the east coast, where I had a support structure, to try to finally get help from the VA.

The VA was horrible. They put me on shit that made me feel like a zombie (trazodone in particular, but all of it did it.) Finally I realized the VA was not helping, (the most help I got was from learning how CBT and CBET worked from an independent org), stopped all their bullshit drugs which I think are a major health problem, stopped drinking, and came back to my state. I didn't mean to stay. I just wanted to catch up with family and friends, and was intending to go to Seattle because cannabis had just been legalized, and then I met a that woman I fell in love with.

I ended up staying in my state, but my SO had a druggie brother and an alcohol dad, and many concerns about the illegality of it, so my usage of cannabis, no matter when or in what amounts, became a fighting issue. So I tried to quit (because love is more important than anything right?). What ended up happening though is that I fell into this vicious cycle where I would have a particularly rough time for a while and would give in, toke up furiously for a week or two, cause a fight, and then quit only to find myself drinking instead (even once started dipping for a few months as my vice to replace the others, and let me tell you dipping is nasty as hell). Then I'd be "good" for a while until I had another hard time (like a week of super bad hypervigilance at night causing very little sleep), and the cycle would repeat. Obviously this eventually ended the relationship.

I tried very hard to keep this all in my personal life though, and protect my professional life from those troubles. This whole time I was performing fairly well in my job(s). I could have been doing so much better, but I was surviving given the double life I was leading. Eventually the stress leaked though, and I ended up quitting my job with very little notice because of an unrelated unhappiness there (being underpayed).

So now I am now using the rest of my GI bill to go to an online school and finish my degree while I job search in legalized states so I don't have to deal with the paranoia surrounding it's legality. I determined it was my medicine and I deserve to have my medicine without feeling guilt or ashamed or being scared of being arrested.

That said, I wanted to test myself to see how bad things are as a baseline, so I am now two months drug free (minus caffeine) and despite the ol PTSD rearing it's head a bit, it's better than it ever has been and I intend to stay drug free until I make it to a legal state.

Right now my main internal discussion is if I am willing to be on a list of patients in a medical only state or if I find anonymity important enough to only go to a recreationally legal state.

That's my story. I hope it's useful to you in some way or interesting to others.

I'm in tech. My first experience with drugs other than weed, which I just don't enjoy, happened relatively late. I was around 30 at the time when I joined friends of a friend taking MDMA at a club.

I have experienced chronic depression for as long as I can remember. I was rarely actually "sad", as one might think. I was simply experiencing most emotions through a sort of fog. The most troubling symptom has always been what one would just call "extreme laziness". Even though I frequently attempted all sorts of methods to motivate myself and acquire discipline, I always failed. Recently, I found a "contract" I made with myself when I must have been around 12 years old, specifying all sorts of activities such as sports, reading, and socialising to be completed on a schedule for certain rewards. Later, I sought help through the medical system. But even though I tried three different anti-depressants and two therapists, their valiant efforts failed to make a dent.

After three years of recreational drugs I cannot say that they are the answer to my problem. But it is certainly an experience that has helped me make some inroads. Much like learning to bike with training wheels, they gave me an appreciation of the range of emotions one can experience. Both exhilarating, all-forgetting thrill, as well as content serenity, were states I only knew from literature.

I've consumed MDMA, 2CB, LSD, Speed, and Ketamine. I'm staying away from Cocaine, all opiates, and GHB. I do consume speed at work. The enjoyment of working in a flow-like state is magnificent, although it comes with its own downsides, mostly a tendency to dive into time-wasting side-issues. Even though I have overdone it on multiple occasions, sometimes working for four days straight, I've have never had trouble not taking anything for a few weeks when I was travelling, or simply ran out. I've also almost completely stopped drinking alcohol.

I've been in a joyful relationship for the last five years, and we've used drugs to find previously unthought-of depts of sexual pleasure.