There are things that happen in our lives which can be tough to process, to be with, to do anything other than sweep under the rug and try to move on. There is, however, a problem with this approach. Very often the process of trying to move on results in continually tripping over the lump in the rug. I finally began a process last week of purging myself of just such an incident after 20-some years of trying to avoid the lump.
This evolved over the course of two diaries and has also involved sending allegation reports to various agencies including the NRC and the New Jersey Attorney General's office. Both diaries were rather long and I was advised by various Kossacks to either shorten them or split them up. And so, this diary is part I of that process.
[Update, link to Part II, and Part III]
Jumping in 3, 2, 1 ...
Because one of the fundamental issues here involved my use of drugs I choose to begin with a bit of background on myself and my relationship with various drugs, especially marijuana. I also discuss the early years working for GPU Nuclear, first at Three Mile Island, and then at Oyster Creek in New Jersey. (Part II will discuss the controversies in which I was involved during my GPU Nuclear years and the incidents I've reported. Part III will discuss how the drug war has been cynically used to punish people for speaking up and blowing the whistle on powerful and connected people.)
So let me make something perfectly clear. I LOVE marijuana. I make no apologies about this to anyone. The only significant problems I have ever seen caused by marijuana were related to its legal status, not to its effects on consciousness or health. Furthermore, my own experience of marijuana is that it contributes significantly to my personal capabilities and intellectual/creative productivity. I also believe that this holds true for many people who use marijuana - particularly those who choose to use it on a regular basis. And while I've heard and read the retorts of anti-marijuana drug warriors who claim that the enhancement effect of marijuana is just a delusion, I have seen and produced tangible results time and again which contradict their claims. The Jeff Spicoli, "Awesome Dude!", stupid stoner stereotype is an adolescent affectation, nothing more.
Early use of marijuana and a surprising discovery
When I was younger I, like many people, bought into the belief that marijuana makes you unable to think clearly. After all, I knew that alcohol certainly made it tough to think clearly. And since pot was illegal and makes you feel funny, it MUST make your thinking unclear also. Meanwhile, my high school in the mid 1970's was pretty much a haven for small time drug dealers and users. There was a blind wall at the end of the school - three stories high and about 100 feet wide, solid brick with not a single window. This was the location of the daily pot party during lunch break. On any given day that wasn't raining there would be upwards of 30 students there smoking cigarettes and/or marijuana. I also had musician friends who mostly spent their school time skipping classes and smoking pot in the woods, or in the parking lot in PJ's van. This was the culture in that place and time.
My own participation at the lunch wall was typically tobacco only. I was a serious student, honor roll type, I was taking a full course load with maxed out science and math and didn't think that getting high during school was a very good idea. [I am also what some might refer to as an exceptionally gifted individual. I'm one of the people who got 99th percentile results across the board in standardized tests in school - which at least means that I test well :) ... I also took an involved, several hour IQ test a few years ago - mostly to test the effect of more than 30 years of pot smoking. It reported that my IQ had risen from the low 130's in 1975 to 140 in 2004. I cheated though, I got high while taking the test.]
So anyway, on occasion I would join in if the timing seemed right - no tests looming, no heavy subject matter to wade through, etc. One day in the spring of 1973 it seemed like a perfect day to catch a good buzz at lunch. My biggest challenge after lunch was English class and though we were supposed to have a test that day on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the teacher hadn't made it in to school and so I figured no test.
When I got to English class still nicely floating along I discovered that the substitute teacher was giving us the test anyway. "Oh Shit!" So I'm working on the first part which was T/F and multiple choice, and feeling a bit more confident as I find the answers mostly coming to me. Then we get to the essay part. There were a number of questions from which we could choose one to answer. As I read the first question it was as though I saw the entire answer flow into my brain in a flash. Though I forget the exact wording, the gist of the question was something like, "In the play, Shakespeare refers to Caesar, Brutus, and Marc Antony as all being honorable men. Given the conflicts between these men how could this be so. Provide examples."
I didn't even bother looking at the remaining question choices, I just started writing. It was almost like taking dictation. I wrote about how each of these men had taken actions that were consistent with their truly held beliefs even in the face of those who opposed them vigorously. I then gave examples from the play which illustrated my point for each of the characters involved. When we got our graded tests back the teacher was handing them out one by one and making occasional comments. At one point she paused and mentioned, "You know, as an English teacher it is very frustrating to grade an essay and not be able to deduct a single point." Then she returned my test. I wasn't surprised though as I knew that my essay was perfectly attuned to the question asked. (What I failed to realize then was how this essay question would come to dominate my life in multiple ways.)
I had a similar experience with a term paper I wrote for my advanced physics class. I was having severe writers' block when I decided to relax and catch a buzz. Within minutes the project was flowing for me. This same experience continued in college. Any time I had a large writing project I ended up attacking it with a steady supply of bong hits and Coca-Cola - coffee in later years. I also discovered that material I studied high I was able to best recall while also high. With this personal insight my testing performance improved noticeably.
How marijuana enhanced my computer programming capability
The first time I saw this marijuana enhancement effect play out in computer programming was while working at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda as a co-op student lab technician. I was tasked with writing an interface program in 8080 assembly language tying an analog to digital converter card to a microcomputer. I had done a bit of assembler programming at school but had always been stoned while doing so. It was kind of fun, like a math puzzle. But this project was a struggle. Then I caught a cold and ended up working from home for a couple of days. This also allowed me to get stoned while I was working. I had the finished assembler code with me when I came back to work. After entry and some minor debugging it worked. This piece of code was roughly 100 lines of assembler instructions. My boss at the time had meanwhile been mentioning how well his son was doing as an assembler programmer, averaging between 7 and 8 lines per day. Now granted, this project had taken a few days prep time to learn the application and plan how to approach the programming task, but even considering all of that I was able to generate far more code than 8 lines a day - as long as I was able to get high.
The specific way getting high helps with programming and other complex tasks seems to relate to information organization and retrieval. When I am high I can hold a sort of map of the entire project in my consciousness. Using this map I am able to move through levels of organization at will, diving into detail to write a lower level module while being able to easily shift my focus to the big picture. This enables me to ensure that the new code is consistent with the rest of the structure and will properly integrate and interact. And in many cases, much like the Julius Caesar essay, I am able to see large sections of code in a flash of inspiration and then simply dictate the lines into my program file. It is almost as though that faulty short term memory that is so derided in pot smokers is the result of those brain structure being used for other purposes - like possibly holding the organizing information that makes this process possible. I have often analyzed and reflected upon this process. This is what I've come up with to date. If interested you can read other accounts of people's use of marijuana for a variety of creative endeavors on Dr. Lester Grinspoon's Marijuana Uses website. One, titled Mr. X, was written by Dr. Carl Sagan of Cosmos fame. He was a lifelong marijuana smoker and his widow was active in marijuana law reform.
Now, an aspect of my upbringing and the general attitude of the times comes into play here. I was raised to essentially accept the cynicism and hypocrisy of day-to-day existence in America. Growing up this meant, "Don't get caught because then we'll have to punish you. We know you're going to do stuff that we'd disapprove of and that could get you in trouble, but as long as we never find out about it then all is well." I had already recognized that smoking pot made a huge difference in my productivity and ability to achieve exceptional results. I also had grown accustomed to keeping this reasonably well hidden due to the legal status of pot, but not to the point of paranoia because the times had been changing through the late 70's and it seemed like legalization was on the foreseeable horizon.
I become a nuke worker
I graduated from college in the spring of 1980 with a BS in physics and began looking for work. Through whatever quirk of fate, an old friend from freshman year had become an engineering employment recruiter. I needed work and he needed people for jobs he was trying to fill. My first real job interview was on Three Mile Island with a gentleman named Bill Hamilton. At this point in time the accident at unit 2 was only a year and a few months in the past, and it seemed like an exciting and adventurous place to work. I also had no significant negative attitudes towards nuclear power and when the offer was made I took the job.
My first few months were spent in a trailer on the island taking a course in real time process control computing concepts. Between the formaldehyde from the trailer walls in the summer sun and the dry aspect of the material I frequently found it difficult to stay awake in the afternoons. This was something I'd grown accustomed to in college. I would not be able to keep my eyes open. My ears never shut down though. And when it came time for testing, the courses I'd slept through were the ones in which I most excelled, and in a few cases broke the curve on the up side. Regardless of this fact, my drowsiness became an issue and I had to meet with the training supervisor for a formal tut-tut. I explained my history with this but could see he wasn't convinced. at the same time, I was able to explain to him what it was that we'd been studying during the time in question.
To the Jersey shore
Anyway, I think this may have helped management in their choice to transfer me to New Jersey for my full time employment - I think they didn't want the drowsy guy at the high-profile location. And so in September 1980 I started working at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Forked River, New Jersey. When I joined the department they were in the process of staffing up for a few projects that were imminent. But in the meantime it was my chance to get up to speed on the systems already in place and work on a couple of special projects. I was able to quickly make myself useful, and contributed a few plant-specific modules to an ongoing development project for core management software being developed under a grant from EPRI - the Electric Power Research Institute. I was also falling into the local social flow, and had made a few friends that I had identified as stoners - just as they had identified me - buddar if you will. (It's amazing what Firesign Theater references can accomplish :)
I also made a decision ... that getting stoned for work was an honorable choice. I based this on knowing that my performance was far stronger on pot; that what I'd achieved in college - and by extension the basis for my hiring - had been done using pot; and that the need to keep it secret was simply because society had its collective head stuck up its collective ass regarding the effects of marijuana. Of course, this had to be confined to morning and lunch time. I certainly wasn't ballsy enough to actually bring drugs on site. This was still an operating nuclear power plant with high chain link fences and security at the gates and badged entry through manned security with metal and explosives detectors. There was always the possibility of a pat-down search too so bringing anything in was never a consideration. And besides, even if I had sneaked something in, where was I going to smoke it?
Even so, being able to start the day with a buzz and then refresh at lunch was sufficient to fuel a good bit of my efforts and I was able to progress fairly quickly with promotions and raises. It was also during this time that I started to use cocaine. I had tried it a few times in college but had never had the money to be able to afford more than a tiny amount at any given time. But unlike marijuana, I recognized that cocaine was not at all a good work drug.
It had the opposite effect as that of marijuana despite being widely viewed as a stimulant. I can best describe this using musical analogies. Programming is somewhat like Bach, very deliberate, structured, planned and laid out - marijuana is quite conducive to this state. Cocaine, OTOH, is conducive to beebop jazz - fine for extemporaneous jamming but too abstractly scattering for logic and structured thought. (And besides, as is the nature of cocaine, the relatively small amounts I was buying were never enough to last beyond the weekend. In fact, they were typically never enough to last beyond Saturday night - those of you who know of what I speak need no further explanation.)
Tomorrow - Leak Rate Testing, Whistleblowing and Retaliation.