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Comment by cwilson | Hacker News Reader

Like many others will likely comment, I'm a huge advocate of the legalization of marijuana. I smoked quite a bit of it in my younger years. I could go as far as saying I was a connoisseur. These days I find it cripples productivity and turns me into a zombie. I stay away from it.

This leads me to conclude that this article is total shit. I honestly can't name a single engineer, designer, or writer I know who regularly smokes pot. Yet this article ends with the following line: "There is a raging culture of marijuana use among tech workers in Silicon Valley."

How this was allowed to be published is beyond me.

Edit: A better story would have been "How Silicon Valley is high on innovation. And Adderall."

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You may not know many people who regularly smoke pot because you "find it cripples productivity and turns me into a zombie. I stay away from it." You may be seen by users as either hostile, or at least not obviously friendly to their activity, so they self select you out of that information.

I think similarly, people who are anti-gay don't seem to know a lot of gay people, despite the fact that N% of the population are gay.

Excellent explanation of the confirmation bias, and I suspect this is exactly what's at work here.

Completely concur with your observation, except your analogy with gay people (something beyond one's power of choice) is somewhat uncalled for.

But in both cases one can choose to let it be known or not. You can choose to share that you smoke or not, and you can choose to share that you're gay or not. It's that choice to share information or not that I'm talking about.

I think I know more silicon valley tech people who smoke marijuana once or more per month than who smoke tobacco, but the primary drugs of use (and abuse) are clearly caffeine and other stimulants, followed by alcohol.

You've reminded me of this video talking about coffee now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTVE5iPMKLg

Is there really any good reason why I shouldn't be drinking a lot of coffee? It seems I see as many researches claiming I shouldn't drink much coffee as I see researches claiming I should. I'm not sure what to think about coffee at this point.

Doctors also used to recommend that people smoke cigarettes.

At one period of my life, I drank enormous amounts of coffee. One weekend, I found myself yelling at every member of my family. I decided to totally stop. This was painful with headaches and irritability for about a week.

Then, once that was all out of my system, I noticed that my sleep was different. More calm, somehow.

The last bit convinced me to continue not drinking coffee. I now do perhaps one cup a week, or less.

There was a time, maybe two years ago, when I did a mental survey of about ~75 people who I knew closely in tech and ~90% of them all smoked pot.

I worked with a guy, who was literally on his A-game at work (meaning he had absolutely stellar performance, owned his role and pretty much his whole department) and he smoked every single day on the way IN TO the office.

He even used to go and smoke at lunch.

Even recently, working with a client, we sat in a conf room and the conversation turned to how much the staff of my client smoke pot.

That's interesting. I know a bunch of people involved in startups (engineers and otherwise) and I can say that every single one of them I haven't met in a professional environment smokes pot at a level I had never seen before. The amount of expensive smoking paraphernalia I've seen laying around (and being carried around, which I found quite interesting) is phenomenal.

The vast majority of the engineers/designers I meet are young twenty-somethings doing startup, and I've met a significant proportion of pot smokers among them. In fact, in almost any meetup I attend, I will usually meet several people who smell like pot. Several times at house parties I see people coming inside (from outside) and I'll make a joke about what they were doing outside, and almost every time they will tell me they were smoking pot.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ie/2009/04/have-you-ever-legaliz...

"I have smoked marijuana (and inhaled it, deeply) on more occasions than I can count."

Steve Yegge seems to have been a pot smoker. Most in my circle of friends stopped smoking pot before their finals in university.

Just about anything other than a good night's sleep and a nice glass of water cripples my productivity and turns me in to a zombie, and this wasn't always the case.

In my experience, very few productive people are regular pot smokers.

You don't know how to use Marijuana. You don't need to get completely baked to have positive benefits while working. It's really all about dosage and the way you consume it. I don't smoke it anymore, but I take THC pills that I either make or buy at a dispensary. It is a very clean and useful way to consume Marijuana that doesn't need you to get "baked" and out-of-your-mind stoned.

that's because you smoked indica instead of sativa.

Indeed, cannabis can have a wide range of effects because it's not just one chemical. It's multiple cannabinoids which interact with each other.

A classic sativa variety will contain almost nothing except THC, which produces an "up" high on its own. Higher concentrations of CBD and CBN, as commonly found in indica varieties (eg, "kush" in California) and weed that has been harvested too late, cause a more "stoned" effect and sleepiness.

So because you don't like it and don't know anyone who does... no one does? On the contrary, I know half a dozen and I was only out there for a summer (and I'm returning in a month).

And regarding the sibling comment, my caffeine withdrawl is (for me) worse than cannabis withdrawl (ie: nearly non-existent, from smoking daily 2 years -> cold turkey results in a caffeine headache for a few hours on the third day or so and that's about it, minus any sleeping trouble depending on your habits). Plus, really, using in the evenings has zero affect on me at work the next morning other than a weird sense of calmness generally).

edit: For anyone curious, and for full disclosure, it can muck with your falling asleep for a few weeks if you are used to using it in the evenings before bed. Camomile tea, melatonin and increasing exercise in the evening can help clear that up much faster and is probably not that bad of an idea for me anyway.

As a frequent smoker, I'm very curious about this. I'm a grad student but I've interned at Google Mountain View a couple times. At Google I had a couple intern friends who also smoked but I would absolutely NEVER consider admitting to being a frequent user among coworkers I wasn't outside-of-work friends with, as none of them ever seemed to talk about having drug experiences (other than alcohol/caffeine) so I feared they'd think less of me for it. I'm sure most were likely in favor of marijuana legalization as most of their politics seemed to go that way, but none of them would ever openly admit to using it regularly. (This seems similar to the attitude on HN, hence why I'm on a throwaway account while admitting to be a frequent smoker.) As such, I found myself agreeing with GP, that the article seemed quite off-base. But of course this is definitely all anecdotal evidence - I wouldn't be surprised if there were teams even at Google where people openly admit to smoking weed regularly.

Yes, I still fear stigma. Having a more carefree friend (roommate in college) that had the same internship as me helped me meet others, though I keep the actual act of consumption to myself. I fear being judged, but I think that will dull with time, especially in places like CA, WA, CO.

Long story shorter and more relevant: I've picked up a knack for knowing what "hot topics" I can talk about with certain coworkers or friends (or most of all, family). I certainly err conservatively.

As for HN: I've noticed the same trend here. It seems really mixed and it is kind of enjoyable that people still feel comfortable expressing themselves. Reddit has it's dissenters but most people don't say much beyond "I support legalization" even if they disagree with cannabis usage. I've come into more contact with "pot makes you waste your life" types around here, and I'm okay with that. I don't need anyone to judge me, finding happiness in life is an extreme priority for me, so "haters gonna hate" I guess. (But you'll note that my username here on HN is not attached to my real name in anyway as far as I know).

But more directly to the point, if it were to come up at work, I wouldn't have a problem with admitting to using or conversing about legalization. Via my internship my team knows that they can rely on me and I think my work stands for itself. And most of all, I'm really hopeful that my employer isn't interested in my personal life beyond my work. Frankly, if anything else, I've noticed a shocking amount of presumption that I must have smoked because I'd been to college...

I doubt people are presuming that you smoked because you've been to college. That's not a common assumption, at least in my circles.

Regular pot smokers have a certain vibe. Not necessarily red eyes, but a way of being very casual and slightly disconnected. If you disagree with me, then think about how you 'just know' when someone is a pot smoker. There are subtle but telling mannerisms.

Which tells me that long-term pot use has an effect on personality.

Wow, could you perpetuate silly stereotypes more? I already gave an example of one way I notice other people might.

Very casual and disconnected? Red eyes? Yeah, when I'm high my eyes are incredibly red, but I could be high at 10PM and you wouldn't know at 8:30AM.

You realize you suffer from confirmation bias? You know a spacey stoner and so you think everyone who gets high must be casual and disconnected? Let me guess, I must also be dull, inattentive, absentminded?

Here's a tip for you: you have absolutely no idea whether the people you meet smoke pot or not, except for maybe a fringe subset who 'act like stoners' and meet your own preconceived notions. Even then, you are probably wrong a lot of the time.

There are no universal 'telling mannerisms' of pot smokers. Quite a lot of pot smokers are anything-but-casual, hyper-focused, driven individuals. Not just programmers, but executives, politicians, power brokers, athletes, lawyers, surgeons, and so on.

If you disagree with me, it implies that you don't have significant experience with the industry described in this article. (Not the tech industry. The other one.)

Anectodally speaking, I've met kids who smoked regularily or even sold pot, and the were astute and interconnected. Try to call every pot smoker you know into your mind and check whether they seem casual and slightly disconnected. If it doesn't help, we'll come over and hook up the JTAG debugger and see what's wrong, maybe...maybe I've been doing to much computers lately.

(Throwaway)

"[...] as none of them ever seemed to talk about having drug experiences [...]"

These are your work colleagues for goodness's sake, when would that sort of thing come up?

Not the OP, but when you share the same room and breath the same air for 8+ hours five days per week with some random people (your work colleagues) you tend to play the "social animal" part and get into conversations that go beyond the next sprint or the latest Rails bug. I find it normal.

No, because of the thousands of people I've encountered in the industry (you could say my sample size), a very small portion of them were regular pot smokers. Of those, an even smaller portion were actually productive (especially engineers) while high.

My conclusion is based on a large amount of data analyzed over a lengthy period of time.

I can't dispute your data and don't want to play the anecdote game (by sample size, you would certainly win), but at the very least, you must admit there is a stigma and unless you're dosing every person with truth serum, let alone asking them about their illicit drug use in the first place... you're probably not getting the whole picture.

Yes, yes, I know unproductive pot users. I knew them before they found pot. Pot became their excuse for their largely existing laziness but in most cases it didn't fundamentally change them and "make" them unproductive.

edit: Oh, to make sure we're on the same page, I wouldn't advocate going to work high. I actively avoid being high in social situation, though I do tend to get work done on my side projects even when not 100% sober. But I guess I'd still consider arrogant and inappropriate to go to work high.

Could there be under-reporting at play in your data set? I imagine that there would be a number of unknown smokers on a scale of thousands of people met.

I suspect we know an overlapping set of people, and there are definitely some regular (once a week?) pot smokers in the set of productive engineers I know in the Bay Area, and a much larger number of occasional (monthly?) smokers.

The real pot fiends are usually vesting in place or in boring ops/admin jobs at tech companies (uh, Yahoo!), but even at startup parties there is a moderate amount of pot on the weekends.

I'm happy to concede your point that it is a rare person indeed who is productive in programming while high, but I don't think that has too much bearing on how many engineers smoke pot in general.

I mean, of the thousands of drivers I've met in my life, a vanishingly small percentage of them are skillful drivers while drunk -- doesn't mean they don't drink when not driving, though.

Personally, I'm a lot more inclined to light up a doobie when I want to prevent myself from working, and gently force myself to chill out and enjoy the process of making dinner with my wife, or tidying up the garage.

You do have the creative/productive phases though, which have to alternate for creativity/productivity. Or since this is horrible misleading naming, let's call it open and closed mental periods, as John Cleese called them during his talk at video arts (http:;;//vimeo.com/;;18913413 remove assembly comments). Marijuana does, in small doses, help to enter the open period (playing around and picking an idea), whereas drugs such as caffeine or nicotine aid closed mode thinking (ironing out the kinks).

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