“I was a nasty piece of work”

It was a month ago that Matthew Liddell, a CTO for a top tier investment bank in New York, told his co-workers that this year would be one to be remembered as the year he finally abandoned drugs and drink.

Although he successfully averted the threat of being fired by turning off narcotics, the 39-year-old agile-minded high-flyer eventually admitted himself to a rehab clinic last week after failing to kick his demons.

His brother Doug, a well-known IT management consultant, told me ‘the downfall of Matthew wasn’t drugs or drink, but the attitude of his bosses towards drug use. Hundreds of IT workers may be going down the same route. Creative people often work at top speed and they are highly successful at what they do but they need to balance work stress and lifestyle.’

‘Matthew is a creative guy who has been a functioning drug user and alcoholic from the age of 26. Drink and drugs frequently lubricated his 70-hour shifts. If you can function and get on with the job, then by and large I think people should leave you alone,’ says Doug who maintains that there are plenty of people in similar positions of trust throughout the US.

IT professionals are often
put under immense strain
to innovate and beat
the competition

‘ You can take it from me that a drink and drug culture among the IT workers in America is stronger than ever, as workers overindulge to cope with long hours, stress and the need for new ways of doing things. IT professionals are often put under immense strain to innovate and beat the competition. The bosses know that but still they complain when their workers take whatever they need to relax. I can’t see really how people complain – you accept the consequences when you load too much work on someone.

Besides which, I can’t see what someone’s Saturday night habits have to do with their employers.’

And, like his brother, Doug Liddell knows this from past experience.

‘My big brush with drug use was 2002, when I was working in London. The City, the finance area, was a dark place to work and lots of people were being made redundant. Somehow I escaped the redundancy programme and turned to coke.

‘When I was actively taking drugs, I was more highly ranked in work surveys; I was incredibly driven and ruthless. I was a nasty piece of work. I’m much more boring now. My life used to be full of drama’

The burden of the drug habit.

‘Unless somebody was unruly, and obviously completely inebriated in the office, we would be unlikely to take any action,’ says one human resources manager of a Dow Jones company. ‘The only time we have done so is when someone gets out of hand, and their language becomes sexually motivated.’

It’s a surprising comment, in the light of the fact that the US government estimates that work-related drug and alcohol problems cost the American economy $25 billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism and other burdens. More than 17m working days are lost to alcohol-related, and drugs-related, absence.

The UK government gives an equivalent figure of £6.4bn a year

Last year, a well-known re-hab centre in the UK led a high-profile advertising campaign in the business pages of US targeting high-performing alcoholics and drug-users in the financial and professional services industry – professions that can afford its services.

Employers who conduct random drug tests say they have found a 34 per cent increase in positive tests for cocaine in 2007, according to David Behr who works for America’s largest drug and alcohol testing company.

Behr told me that last year one in 350 IT employees in the US tested positive for some drug use. In 1997 the figure was one in 1,000.

The new data suggests that drug use is no longer limited to wealthy lawyers or bankers working long hours.

Mary Braun of the drugs charity Druglink said: ‘Cocaine is now the recreational drug of choice. The cost has come down dramatically in the past few years.

‘Whereas people might have previously smoked a joint at the weekend to relax, they now go for coke on a Friday night.”

Positive test results for other drugs and alcohol are also on the rise, albeit at a considerably slower rate. About 5 per cent of IT workers tested positive for drugs and alcohol last year, a 5.4 per cent increase on 2006, according to Behr.

The steady increase in the number of positive drugs tests – up by a fifth over a decade – will encourage opponents of random testing, who say it does little to dissuade workers from taking drugs.

Hugh Robertson, a health and safety officer in the UK said that overall ‘there’s no evidence at all that drugs testing makes the workplace any safer or healthier.’ Drugs charities say that the best policy is to create a working environment where people do not feel under pressure to drink or take drugs too much and says narcotic problems should be seen as health issues rather than grounds for discipline.

This encourages staff with problems to come forward and reduces the likelihood of collusion by colleagues not wishing to get somebody into trouble.

The techie/druggie connection

According to some, drugs and the modern IT industry have always been linked. It’s a provocative thesis: according to Ben Saunders, who has worked in software development for the past 30 years including stints in Silicon Valley, it was ever thus.

…the ‘Valley’ now is low on
coke-addled dealmakers,
drunk bosses, and
celebrity rehab cases

‘I’ve worked in places where drug use is fairly normal. But though snorting coke and smoking cannabis in NYC for example is driven by the general desire for sociability, it is increasingly driven by stress and the need for a swift release. The modern form of drug taking in IT and other professions is so much more destructive. People are using it as a way of escaping. Compared to New York, L.A, or D.C. the ‘Valley’ now is low on coke-addled dealmakers, drunk bosses, and celebrity rehab cases.’

‘A boss that I worked for recently was so completely obsessed by drugs, drinking and work that you had to get out of his way because his behaviour was completely unreasonable. One time he took off all his clothes and just lay on the floor totally naked and when his secretary came he threw a stapler at her because she didn’t pay attention to what he was saying.’

Saunders says that this would never have happened in the 1960s or 1970s when the working environment was much calmer.

‘Most people didn’t fuss about it – it was just a part of life. Developers took different drugs for different reasons:

• They thought that marijuana was great for focusing on a knotty logic problem.
• They took Ecstasy or MDMA because they thought that it would block out stress and users could be candid about their feelings.
• They took LSD and other psychedelics to bring on hallucinations.

‘Much of the pioneering work in PC technology was done by ‘a big brain with a buzz on and there’s a decent chance some of the hardware and software we are using right now was conceived, and maybe implemented, by someone like that.

‘You can see the techie/druggie connection yourself by making a trip to the annual Burning Man event just across the Nevada border. There you’ll see plenty of open drug use by people who’ll gladly tell you about their day jobs at hot Valley companies.

‘The other 51 weeks of the year require much more time management, thanks to long work schedules but some guys smoke pot out on the loading bay during lunch or at their breaks. The harder stuff gets stashed until the weekend, though.

‘But even at the maddest tech party, you’ll find plenty of cold-sober revellers. It’s important to understand that Valley folk view recreational drug use the way the same way they do back-dated stock options: As long as no one gets hurt or arrested, what matters is the outcome. I think some drug use is a potentially helpful tool for geeks.’

Disordered thinking.

John Markoff, the veteran New York Times journalist makes a convincing case for the link in his 2005 book ‘What the Dormouse Said’. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers

According to Markoff, all those acid-gobbling, pot-smoking, tie-dyed renegades apparently had a messianic belief that computing power should be spread throughout the world.

He makes the case that it is indisputable that many of the engineers and programmers who subsequently contributed to the birth of personal computing, and who are now the owners of vast Technology companies, were once, in their studant days, fans of LSD.

The young Steve Jobs returned from back-packing around India with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs, like many others, experimented with LSD, later calling these experiences “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.”

When in a 1994 Playboy interview, Bill Gates was asked if he ever took LSD, he replied ‘My errant youth ended a long time ago. There were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.’

Markoff says ‘My belief is that computers, like psychedelic drugs, are tools for mind expansion, for revelation and personal discovery’.

His book cites the famous case of Doug Engelbart’s quest to technologically augment the human mind by taking part in Myron Stolaroff LSD tests at the International Foundation for Advanced Study.

Contrary to contemporary belief, the idea then was that drugs, and LSD in particular, could unlock intellectual potential and deliver a calm mind and not the social withdrawal and disordered thinking as usually happened.

More than 350 people including IT venerable Bob Sackerman, founder of Sun Microsystems; Fred Moore, the co-founder of the Homebrew Computer Club participated in the tests. What came through after all that effort, all that preparation, all that naked ambition was in essence, very little

In fact some say the experiments was not that much different than those introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who encouraged the Beatles to swap hallucinogenic drugs for more natural highs.

Of the time-honoured link between drugs and technology Markoff says; ‘To anyone who has experienced a drug-induced epiphany, there may indeed be a cosmic hyperlink there: fire up your laptop, connect wirelessly to the Internet, search for your dreams with Google: the power and the glory of the computing universe that exists now was a sci-fi fantasy not very long ago, and yes, it does pulsate with a destabilizing, revelatory psychic power.’