Cocaine use in London’s financial district is running rampant, according to Bloomberg.
Bankers, brokers, and traders are all trying to keep the high they get from their day jobs running through the night.
It’s not much of a secret, either.
“It’s the same rush from doing a deal and doing cocaine,” Junor, 45, says. “The adulation from doing a deal spills into going for a beer and then a party — it’s an amorphous blob of energy.” Everyone knows about the City’s drug problem, recovering addicts say. Bosses turn a blind eye to drugs, as long as you’re making money for your firm — and until recently, making big money was easy to do.
Even lawyers are getting swept up. After the jump, one laid-off lawyer’s tale.
Lawyers aren’t getting the buzz of high-stakes trades and constant chatter, but they’re just as susceptible to cheap prices and plentiful supply.
Some drug addicts hit rock bottom after losing their jobs. One former associate at a global law firm in Canary Wharf used his salary to support a decade-long cocaine habit. In January, he lost his job and had 30,000 pounds in tax-free severance money with nothing to do all day.
“I used lots of coke and gambled,” says the lawyer, 28, who asked to remain anonymous. “I had early onset of cocaine psychosis. You start to go mad. In the last three months of using, I saw, or imagined I saw, insects crawling on me.”
After an intervention from his family, the lawyer checked into a Priory detox clinic in London. The recovering lawyer is staying clean by going to daily addicts’ meetings.
We’re really not interested in outing the lawyer, but for our American readers, Canary Wharf is home to a number of firms, including Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy, and Skadden’s UK office. CC and A&O have laid off more than 500 lawyers between the two of them, so we’re not providing a whole lot of personal information.
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I guess there's a reason that lawyers have such high rates of substance abuse!
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