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 shouldering 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 the demands of the job require them to lean more on stimulants.
Trevor Lunsford, who works in the mergers and acquisitions department of Ascend Capital in Washington, DC, told the Journal that he has been on Adderall for the last seven years.
“It’s a very core, integral component of my life, and to me, something that is a very, very important tool,” he said.
Lunsford said he would take business trips that required him to fly from DC to Denver. For a month, he woke up at 6 a.m. to catch a flight to Detroit early in the week — and then transfer to a connecting flight to Denver.
After deplaning in Denver, he would meet clients and then spend eight hours at a management presentation.
“For a couple of days of the week, it was very regularly a 20- to 22-hour day,” Lunsford told the Journal.
“That’s something that I would not have been able to be on for, be focused and be quick with decisions if I wasn’t able to take Adderall.”
Jonah Frey, who worked as an investment banker in health care for Wells Fargo in San Francisco in 2020, said Adderall would help him get through the day, which often began at 4 a.m. local time and ended at around 2 a.m. the next day.
In 2021, he took a position at New York-based Leerink Partners, the former investment banking arm of Silicon Valley Bank.
“My workload went up at least two- or threefold, and that’s when things started to go south,” he said.
In order to cope, Frey upped the dosage of Adderall — a prescription for which he obtained from the online health care firm Teladoc.
“I started taking it once in the morning and then once in the afternoon, at first for five days a week, and then it became seven days a week because I was working most weekends,” he said.
Frey said the effects of the pills made him lose track of what day it was. He lost his appetite and shed some 25 pounds.
In 2022, he quit the job and stopped taking Adderall.
“I went in understanding the downside risks” of using Adderall, he said.
“But the reward was making managing director and pulling in a seven-figure salary. I felt that I had to have an edge to make it.”
The Post has sought comment from Credit Suisse, Ascend Capital, Leerink Partners and Wells Fargo.
