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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."
A couple of years back I broke my leg. I was given a prescription of hydrocodone and being afraid of them due to all of the addiction stories and the fact that, for some odd reason, my leg never really hurt that badly, I did not take them but I did keep them around. A few months after recovery I was working on my gait and felt something pop in my lower back. The next day I was in severe pain (it was at least 11) and I was told it was a pinched nerve.
I broke down and took one of the hydrocodones and about 20 minutes later, through the slightly lightheaded haze, I experienced some of the most intense, intense hours of extreme focus. I dedicated my time and wrung out tomes of code. It just flowed forth, from the mind of the keys to the screen. After about four hours, it would subside and I'd look back at my work in astonishment. The code was really, really good. I remember thinking to myself "I wrote that!?"
I continued for the next two weeks while my pinched nerve slowly became less inflamed and everything returned to normal. I had about two weeks worth of hydrocodone left in the bottle. But you know what? I had absolutely no desire to take them once the pain in my back was gone. I had no withdrawl symptoms, no shakes, fevers, or anything else. I also did not have a dimwit Valley manager breathing down my neck to finish a project so they could get their next bonus at my expense.
Having spent time working in the Valley, I have little desire to return, if any. Between the terrible drivers, rude hipsters, astronomical real estate prices, strange inexplicable odors, ridiculous grocery prices, PG&E, Comcast, the diseased hot-zone known as Fry's, wall to wall people who are completely oblivious to their surroundings and stand right in the goddamn middle of every aisle in every store ... living in the Valley is absolutely madness! If you live there and like it, you're either nucking futs or you've never experienced normalcy.