Young Wall Street bankers snort lines of crushed Adderall pills from their desk to cope with 22-hour work days: report

Wall Street’s grinding office culture has pushed young bankers to resort to snorting lines of crushed Adderall pills from their desks in order to make it through workdays that can stretch as long as 22 hours, according to a report.Twenty- and thirty-somethings looking to get ahead in finance told the Wall Street Journal that “nobody blinked an eye” when seeing a colleague ingest Adderall, a prescription medication used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as if it were cocaine.Young bankers also are relying on stimulants such as the drug Vyvanse and super-caffeinated energy drinks, the report said.Mark Moran, who scored an internship at investment banking giant Credit Suisse in New York, managed to score a prescription for Adderall from a local health clinic even though a psychologist in his family didn’t think he had ADHD, according to the Journal.He said he needed something to help him get through the grueling 90-hour week.“They gave me a script, and within months, I was hooked,” Moran, 33, told the Journal.

“You become dependent on it to work.”The intense workload that is forced on Wall Street workers came under scrutiny earlier this year when a Bank of America investment banker, 35-year-old Leo Lukenas III, died of acute coronary artery thrombus.In the weeks prior to his death, Lukenas, a former Green Beret, was routinely logging 100 hours per week to complete a project involving a $2 billion acquisition.A subsequent Wall Street Journal investigation found that Bank of America regularly ignored the company’s own rules and guidelines that are aimed at preventing bankers from logging dangerously excessive workloads.The Journal story prompted other companies such as Morgan Stanley to impose stringent requirements so that junior bankers work no more than 80 hours per week.Dozens of industry workers who spoke to the Journal said that the demands of the job require them to lean more on stimulants.Trevor Lunsford, who works in the merg...