Why are so many people getting high at work now?

Until recently, 25-year-old Stuart*, a software engineer based in Manchester, smoked cannabis on every remote shift he had. “I work from home three days a week,” he tells Dazed. “I would smoke during my shift on pretty much every work from home day up until last autumn.” Stuart, who asked to remain anonymous, used to smoke cannabis every day, until he recently quit. “I just smoked out of habit,” he says. “I could get away with it because most of my days I don’t have any actual work to do, I just have to be online.” In fact, he only stopped smoking on shift when he completed a week-long boot camp and failed to retain any of the information. “I started to get the feeling I was on my boss’s radar, so I’ve been working sober ever since.” 

Using drugs at work is nothing new: myriad industries are famed for their drug use. On screen, Philip Bartani’s Boiling Point depicts the hospitality industry’s love affair with cocaine, while The Wolf of Wall Street captures the normalisation of stimulant use in the finance world. The Beatles would use amphetamines while gigging through the night in their pre-fame days in Hamburg, then later switched to using psychedelics for creative purposes. It’s been reported that employees at VICE would routinely turn up to work visibly high. Elon Musk has admitted to microdosing ketamine to “help his depression”, and other Silicon Valley workers have long used psychedelics to expand their minds. Even UK politicians have been caught using cocaine in Westminster. The list goes on. Even those who don’t use illicit substances may have dabbled in using certain supplements and nootropics to enhance their brain power. Whether it’s uppers, downers or psychedelics, people all over the world use drugs to help with their work, and workers have never been more enabled.

Since 2020, the number of white-collar workers switching from office-based work to home-based work has increased massively. According to the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, 39 per cent of the UK’s workforce works from home either some or all of the time. While the benefits and disadvantages of remote work have been widely debated, it’s true that remote workers have some more freedom in what they can get up to during their usual eight-hour shifts. Some people manage to work multiple remote jobs at once, while others use their time at home to catch up on the chores they’d usually do in their spare time. Others, it seems, have used the opportunity to use drugs.

Adam*, 26, a marketing executive based in Salford, also occasionally uses drugs while working from home, mostly cannabis. “It can make some boring tasks less boring,” he says. “But I don’t do it if I have meetings or a lot of work to get through.” Adam has also used cocaine and ketamine while working, but nowhere near as frequently. “I’ve used cocaine extremely rarely, only if there was some left from a social event and I had a much higher workload than usual,” he says. “But never if I had meetings where my camera and microphone were required.” As for ketamine, he would only use it when he considered his work done for the day, but was technically still on the clock. While some of this is recreational, Adam says that he has been addicted to certain drugs in the past. “I am currently able to go periods of time without taking drugs every day, and I no longer take any, other than cannabis, while at work,” he says. 

While there are few statistics on recreational drug use at work, a survey by the American addiction site DrugAbuse.com found that 22.5 per cent of people admit to consuming drugs or alcohol at work, with one in five using cannabis while on the job. 

“I could get away with it because most of my days I don’t have any actual work to do, I just have to be online” – Stuart*

It’s obviously not uncommon to have an alcoholic drink on a Thursday or Friday afternoon. It’s a way to mark the end of a busy week and take the edge off. For people who work from home, alone, it wouldn’t exactly be alarming to hear they’d cracked open a can a couple of hours before clocking off for the week. “There’s a normalisation of legal drug use [such as alcohol] in the work environment,” Paul North, drug policy expert and director of Volteface, tells Dazed. “I think if people have recreational relationships with illicit drugs, and they view them a bit like alcohol, in the sense that it isn’t a big deal, it doesn’t have to be considered problematic for them to use drugs like cannabis in the same way other people use alcohol.”

There are certain subsets of the population for whom recreational drug use is normalised – students and graduates, for example, often have a much higher rate of drug use than other young people. For them, a few tokes of a spliff of a Friday afternoon isn’t something to worry about (unless they were smoking all day every day and missing deadlines). But when it comes to understanding whether or not someone’s drug use is problematic, North believes it’s important to look at the context in which they’re using them. 

First of all, there’s the why: If it’s to blow off steam on a Thursday evening, fine. If it’s to get through the shift, not so much. “I always say you should take drugs to make a good time better, not to make a bad time bearable,” he says. “If you’re doing the latter, it’s worth assessing your relationship with the drugs you’re using.” The same goes for situations where someone is using drugs habitually and their working environment simply enables them to continue doing so, as is the case for Adam and Stuart. “There’s another group of workers who have got problematic relationships with drugs, but working in a non-remote environment prevents that from becoming an issue at work,” says North. In a remote work environment, there is less risk (of being caught) and way more temptation, which may enable someone to continue to use drugs problematically with little to no immediate consequences. 

“If someone is using drugs at work in a problematic way, they should be treated with compassion and offered help, rather than being demonised” – Paul North

In the same vein, there are certain industries where drug use is completely normalised, such as in catering, hospitality and entertainment. Robin*, 23, used cocaine and speed regularly while working as a drug safety officer at a nightclub in London. “Doing drugs would help me get through shifts every now and then,” they tell Dazed. “A lot of staff did the same there so I felt slightly peer pressured at points to do so too.” Robin says that drug use was completely normalised in the workplace. “We were advised not to [take drugs] but I would estimate that 90 per cent of staff were doing the same.” 

Whether it’s working at home or in an environment where drug use is heavily normalised, the path to dependency can be a slippery slope. As North notes, one of the main things that sends people down the spiral of drug addiction is a lack of responsibility. If workers don’t have a need not to do drugs, then it makes sense that some might develop problematic relationships with them.

Ultimately, the only way to ensure the safety of workers in this context is for businesses to have a completely non-judgemental approach to drug use, allowing workers to come forward if they feel that they need to. “It’s important for human resources departments to have regular check-ins with employees, especially if they don’t see them around the office,” says North. “It’s important to recognise that drug use isn’t black and white, and if someone is using drugs at work in a problematic way, they should be treated with compassion and offered help, rather than being demonised.”