There does indeed to be rampant and irresponsible use of these ‘legal speed’ ADD/ADHD drugs amongst the American elite…and it’s not difficult to see how these drugs could have skewed and warped their judgment.

A sufficiently sophisticated system could collect individual specimens, but really we’re more interested in epidemiology here.

So I was speculating that maybe widespread use of mood-enhancers within the rather small finance-finance media-think tank communities, reinforced and multiplied by social-psychological effects, might have affected their collective judgment.

As far as I know, there’s no community where finance-finance media- think tanks comprise a major demographic citywide. I suppose that if you could tap a sewer pipe immediately downstream from Wall Street you might get something. But in truth, I’m not putting much energy into testing this.

If you’re saying that everyone uses speed, well, that’s not much of a theory. They’re only human! (It’s something of a theory if everyone used to use cocaine and now everyone uses speed.) If it’s just MDs and financiers, that should show up in a water test.

If you’re saying that very few people use speed, so it shouldn’t show up in the water, then you have to explain why this matters to finance and not to medicine. It’s certainly true that power is more concentrated in finance than medicine (though I’d say that’s more about NY financiers being more important than others, rather than concentration within NY), but you have to explain why the powerful ones are the ones with impaired judgement. Certainly, the rapid career path could select for speed users and fail to offer feedback to teach people how to compensate for the impaired judgement. But I tend to think it’s the underlings working 80 hour weeks who use speed more than the bosses.