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by justinjlynn 1008 days ago
If people phrased it as what it was "doing psychoactive drugs with co-workers/competitors in a non-work setting" ... the activity would seem as dangerous as it always was. It's just that now people, rightfully, have higher expectations of each other's behaviour because work forces otherwise incompatible people together due to economic pressures and those relationships must remain collegial. Those pressures have always been there, but as time has gone on - and especially since the 1970s with the rise telecommunications and database technologies - that social pressure has only increased due to the growth of more tightly knit but wider scoped social networks (among essentially all employers in a field, esp.). This has grown to global social networks and databases essentially creating a permanent reputation in all aspects of life. Job mobility has likewise decreased. Given that psychoactive drugs alter a persons mind and cause a person to do things they most likely would never do when they were sober, and esp. at work - the changing culture seems a natural outcome of all of those pressures as a rational way to decrease the risk of disaster.