Suddenly Visible: Illicit Drugs As Part of Silicon Valley Culture

The recent death by overdose of Google executive Timothy Hayes has drawn attention to the phenomenon of illegal drug use (including abuse of prescription painkillers) among technology workers and executives in high-pay, high-stress Silicon Valley. The Mercury News takes a look at the phenomenon; do the descriptions of freely passed cocaine, Red Bull as a gateway drug, and complacent managers match your own workplace experiences? From the Mercury News article: "There's this workaholism in the valley, where the ability to work on crash projects at tremendous rates of speed is almost a badge of honor," says Steve Albrecht, a San Diego consultant who teaches substance abuse awareness for Bay Area employers. "These workers stay up for days and days, and many of them gradually get into meth and coke to keep going. Red Bull and coffee only gets them so far." ... Drug abuse in the tech industry is growing against the backdrop of a national surge in heroin and prescription pain-pill abuse. Treatment specialists say the over-prescribing of painkillers, like the opioid hydrocodone, has spawned a new crop of addicts -- working professionals with college degrees, a description that fits many of the thousands of workers in corporate Silicon Valley. Increasingly, experts see painkillers as the gateway drug for addicts, and they are in abundance. "There are 1.4 million prescriptions ... in the Bay Area for hydrocodone," says Alice Gleghorn with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. "That's a lot of pills out there."

Comments

Re:The only good thing

[The Evil Atheist]

Well, one problem is that the teachers lie through their teeth, demonizing marijuana along with heroin.

As they should. I don't agree with the libertarian obsession with marijuana. I don't consider those teachers to have lied at all.

But then you get to high school, and your friends are smoking weed, having fun, and they look fine.

Then you're a fucking stupid kid who can't tell the difference between people looking fine and people being fine.

Your teachers lied to you, and now you know it.

No, because I look at all the kids who started marijuana very young and most of them do nothing of their lives except to look for the next high, the teachers were right that it could ruin your life. I have never felt life required mind altering drugs to be enjoyable. And I wasn't anywhere near those "popular" kids at school - I was an outsider and I made peace with that fact instead.

And the irony is that the most dangerous, most addictive, most popular drugs (alcohol and tobacco), well, these the ones your teachers tell you to use in "moderation." They imply that there's relative safety in these drugs, which is another lie.?

My teachers told us NOT to smoke at all. Some of them even said not to drink at all. And this was in a public school, not a private religious one. In health class, they also regularly showed videos about alcohol and tobacco. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that taking those substances at all might become worse.

So how should you know about the dangers of addiction from heroin or methamphetamines, when your teachers are demonstrably lying to you about drugs?

Because you should have learnt not to be a fucking nuisance and try to get along with the teachers. Me, an unsocial nerd all through life, had enough empathy to realize that my teachers weren't there to torment me. I even got suspended a few times, but still I understood from their perspectives the kids were just fucking arseholes.