Cocaine on the Sites: Use in Construction and the Trades

A plasterer sat in front of me a while back and said something I have heard, in one form or another, from dozens of men in the trades. He said: on our site, the odd one out is the fella who does not take it.

He was not bragging. He was frightened. He had been at it four years, he was earning well, and he could not remember the last Sunday he had felt like a human being. What he wanted to know was whether he was an addict or just a lad who works hard and goes hard, because everyone around him seemed to be doing exactly the same thing and none of them looked worried.

That question is the reason this page exists. Cocaine among construction workers and tradespeople has quietly become one of the biggest things I see in my practice, and it has its own shape — different from the finance and hospitality patterns I have written about in cocaine in high-pressure careers. If you are reading this on a phone in a van at seven in the morning, this is written for you.

Why cocaine took hold among construction workers

It is not a character thing. It is a set of conditions that would push almost anyone the same way.

The work is hard on the body, and it starts early. There is real money coming in, often weekly, often in a lump, and often to lads who never had money like it before. The culture is social and it runs on drink — the pint after the shift, the site Christmas do, the stag, the match. Cocaine slots into drinking so neatly that most people never make a decision to start using it. They just kept drinking longer one night.

Then there is the part nobody names. A lot of the men I work with in the trades carry things they have never said out loud to anybody: a bereavement, a marriage falling apart, a debt, a bad accident on a site years ago that still visits them at three in the morning. The trade does not give you a language for that, and it certainly does not give you a room to say it in. Cocaine is very good, for about forty minutes, at making a man feel like the version of himself he used to be. That is the hook. It was never really about the buzz.

And unlike an office job, there is nobody watching. No HR, no annual review, no manager noticing you are off. If you are self-employed — and most tradespeople are, one way or another — the only thing that tells you whether you are alright is whether the work is getting done. Which is exactly why so many men in this trade are years into a serious problem before anyone says a word to them.

The pattern I see, over and over

It rarely starts as a weekday thing. It starts at the weekend and it stays there for a long time, sometimes years. Then the edges start to move.

Sunday joins Saturday. Then Thursday, because Friday is a doss day anyway. Then the Monday when you are wrecked and behind, and someone offers you a bump in the van and it gets the day done, and you tell yourself that was a one-off. The line between the weekend and the week does not get crossed dramatically. It gets erased slowly, and you only see it afterwards.

Two things usually give it away before anything else does. The first is money, which is strange when you are on good rates — but the money goes and you cannot quite account for it, and the tax bill or the van repair or the deposit never quite happens. I have written properly about that in the real cost of cocaine, because it is nearly always bigger than people think.

The second is the standard of the work. Not dramatic mistakes. Small ones. The snag list getting longer, the price coming in wrong, the job that used to take you two days taking three, the calls you stop returning. Men in the trades live and die on their name, and the slide in work performance after cocaine is usually the thing that finally frightens them into the room with me.

The safety part nobody says out loud

I am not going to lecture you, but I would be failing you if I skipped this.

Almost nowhere else does a comedown carry the consequences it carries on a building site. A comedown means poor sleep, slow reaction time, irritability and impaired judgment — and you are bringing that to scaffolding, to a telehandler, to a saw, to a live board, to a trench. The risk is not only to you. It sits with the apprentice working under you and the lad on the other end of the lift.

The drive matters too. A lot of tradespeople are behind the wheel of a van before six, sometimes only hours after using, and roadside drug testing does not care whether you feel fine — it detects the drug, not the buzz. I have set that out in full in cocaine and driving. Losing a licence in this trade does not just cost you a licence. It costs you the work.

There is also a physical risk that gets brushed off in a job where everyone is sore and tired anyway. Cocaine raises heart rate and blood pressure and puts the heart under strain, and hard physical work in heat does the same thing. Chest tightness, a pounding heart or breathlessness on a site should never be filed under just knackered.

Why it is harder to stop in this trade than in an office

Men in the trades often blame themselves for finding this hard. They should not. The job stacks the deck.

• The money arrives in cash, weekly. Nothing sits between you and a decision at eight on a Friday evening. There is no monthly salary, no card statement anyone will read, no visibility at all.
• The supply is inside the work. For a lot of men it is not a dealer they ring, it is a fella on the crew. That means the trigger and the workplace are the same place, which is far harder than avoiding a bar. Knowing exactly what sets you off matters enormously here — that is why I wrote know your triggers.
• There is no sick pay and no cover. If you are self-employed and you take a fortnight to get yourself right, that fortnight is unpaid and the job may go to somebody else. That is a genuine barrier, not an excuse, and any plan that ignores it will fail.
• The culture punishes admitting it. On a lot of sites you can talk about anything except not coping. So it stays quiet, and men who are actually in trouble sit beside each other all day and neither says a word.
• The tiredness is real. After ten hours of physical work, a substance that makes you feel sharp and social is not an irrational choice. It is an understandable one. It just charges an enormous rate of interest.

What actually works, in this trade specifically

Here is what I would say to the plasterer, and what I would say to you.

Deal with the Friday before Friday. The decision is not made when the powder is in front of you, it is made when you finish work with a wedge of cash, no plan and nowhere to be. Have somewhere to be. Something booked, someone expecting you, the money moved out of your hand before the pint. A plan for Friday afternoon beats willpower at midnight every time.

Change the geography before you change the crew. Most lads cannot walk off a job, and I am not going to tell you to. But you can stop being in the van at the end of the shift, you can leave the site before the drinking starts, and you can take a different job when the next one comes up. If you find yourself having to actually say the words, how to say no when everyone around you is using covers what to say without turning it into a speech.

Tell one person. Not the crew. One person — your partner, a brother, a mate off site, your GP. Secrecy is what keeps this thing alive, and in the trades the secrecy is often the heaviest part of the whole load.

Get help that fits the work. This is where a lot of men fall down. They think help means residential rehab, six weeks off, and everyone finding out. For most people it does not. It means one confidential hour a week, often online, often in the evening, from your own van or your own kitchen, and nobody on site ever knows. That is how the majority of the professionals and tradesmen I work with do it, and it is exactly what quitting without derailing your career is about.

Expect the first fortnight to be flat. You will be tired, low and short-tempered, and you will sleep badly before you sleep well. That is your brain rebalancing, not proof that you cannot do it. It lifts.

The thing worth saying plainly

You are not soft for finding this hard, and you are not a write-off for being in it. You are a man doing physically demanding work in a culture that hands you a drug at the end of it and never once asks how you are.

The men I see turn this around are not the ones with the most willpower. They are the ones who got honest with somebody about six months earlier than they wanted to. If you are not sure whether you are there yet, the am I addicted to cocaine page will tell you more than another Sunday of promising yourself Monday is different — or take the confidential three-minute self-assessment. Nothing is stored, and nobody sees it but you.

Related reading

• Cocaine in High-Pressure Careers: Finance, Law and Hospitality
• Cocaine and Work Performance: The Crash Behind the Confidence
• The High-Functioning Cocaine User: Holding It Together While It Falls Apart

Gary Clinton

Ireland's cocaine addiction specialist — CBT-qualified therapist, bestselling author of Never Give Up, and in long-term recovery himself. Private one-to-one help for professionals, online and worldwide.