The New Wave: Cocaine Addiction Amongst Tech Workers in Silicon Valley

The tech explosion has brought tremendous wealth, opportunity, and vitality to Silicon Valley, home of some of the largest and most prestigious companies in the world. It has also brought a new wave of illicit drug use to the Bay Area, as young, educated, high-achieving professionals seek to enhance their performance and climb to the top of a cutthroat industry. With an average salary of $195,000 (and many making significantly more), tech workers have the means to bypass lesser stimulants and go straight for the tried and true: cocaine. In an interview with National Geographic, a drug dealer who delivers high-grade cocaine to tech workers on demand, day or night, says, “A lot of my customers are tech-savvy guys who like to party and have a good time. [But cocaine also] gives them an edge to work all night.” Steve Albrecht, a substance abuse awareness specialist, says the desire for that edge is born in part from the extraordinary pressure on Silicon Valley workers to perform:

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. These workers stay up for days and days, and many of them gradually get into coke to keep going. Red Bull and coffee only gets them so far.

Eddy, a recovering addict and longtime tech worker, sees the effects of Silicon Valley’s dangerous mix of high expectations and deep pockets every time he attends a Los Gatos Narcotics Anonymous meeting:

You see very few of the old-school addicts; most of these are college-educated folks who, because of the stress of these tech jobs, start doing cocaine to stay up and Oxycodone to relax. Working 80-hour weeks and making crazy money extracts a horrible toll on you.

While some indulge clandestinely, making sure to keep use hidden from coworkers and superiors, in some work environments coke use goes beyond an open secret to just plain open, creating an environment of normalization and even feelings of obligation to partake. But for many, cocaine addiction is driven by deeper desires than professional success and peer support for drug use.

“We are obsessed with drugs here,” says Jhonny, a San Francisco tech worker who makes $300,000 a year and spends a significant portion of that on cocaine. Jhonny is being interviewed for an episode of Drugs, Inc. called “Silicon Valley High.” On camera, he wears a mask and his voice is digitally altered to keep his identity secret, as public disclosure of his drug use could cost him everything. But even as he admits to spending thousands of dollars each year on cocaine, he maintains that his use is manageable, a belief that appears to be rooted primarily in his continued professional success; his tech career spans more than two decades, and he sees a sharp distinction between himself and his friends who have lost their jobs due to drug use. “I have developed special skills to conceal my usage. You’ve got to keep it discreet, you’ve got to keep it behind closed doors, in and amongst your friends, and you’ve got to show up to work.” Despite his claims to not be addicted, he continues ordering coke deliveries to his office even while acknowledging that it could destroy him professionally. Jhonny, however, doesn’t trace his cocaine use to work-related stress or ambitions. Instead, he turned to drugs for reasons shared by virtually all types of drug users: he wants to experience something greater than what he believes sober life offers him. “The reason I started doing drugs was that no matter how much money I made, there was something missing—that rush, that pure adrenaline excitement.” He finds that rush in the neat lines of white powder he cuts on his desk and inhales through a $100 bill.

While the experience of searching for emotional fulfillment in harmful chemicals is common amongst drug users, Silicon Valley may have unique qualities that inform this desire. Many people, including Jhonny, were attracted to tech due to the possibility for great financial gain and assume that money will translate into some form of meaningful satisfaction. However, research has found again and again that above a certain income level, money has no correlation with increased levels of emotional wellness. In a famous study on lottery winners, researchers found “people who had big wins on the lottery ended up no happier than those who had bought tickets but didn’t win”:

One way of accounting for this is to assume that lottery winners get used to their new level of wealth, and simply adjust back to a baseline level of happiness – something called the “hedonic treadmill”. Another explanation is that our happiness depends on how we feel relative to our peers. If you win the lottery you may feel richer than your neighbors, and think that moving to a mansion in a new neighbourhood would make you happy, but then you look out of the window and realize that all your new friends live in bigger mansions.

In Silicon Valley, you are embedded in a culture where you are surrounded by bigger mansions. But with a 60 to 80-hour work week, your opportunities for exploring potential true and sustainable sources of emotional fulfillment are limited. Particularly elusive is often the one source of real happiness that, unlike money, is not vulnerable to hedonic adaptation: close, meaningful relationships with other people. PBS’s This Emotional Life explains, “In contrast to material goods, we are more likely to continue to want our close relationships, even after we attain them, and to continue to derive positive emotions from them.” As the tech world’s crushing pace and extreme demands on workers damages your ability to nurture relationships with friends, partners, and family, you find a way to make your money temporarily fill the emotional void: by turning it into cocaine.