>>14258350Very common.
The majority of people in my lab/grad student "class" (the umbrella program before we joined labs) did something or another. Alcohol + weed was obvious and common; a lot of us would rent an Airbnb and do shrooms. Aside from adderal, the harder shit (cocaine, opioids) was a little more frowned upon so if someone did it or not, so it wasn't common knowledge if someone did them (but it was pretty common still).
I know at least one person who dropped out after getting way too addicted to whippets and cocaine.
I remember one hell of a conference I went to (one of the huge cell bio conferences) where there was free beer at a bar for alumni of a certain class, and it got out, so the place was PACKED and ran out of beer in less than 2 hours. Everyone got plastered and we wandered the night and ended up in someone's doubletree room(?) like 20 of us, including the keynote speaker for the conference, big fucking wig. Cocaine lines in the bathroom, passed out people all over the place. Fucking nuts.
I think I read some bullshit buzzy article claiming that people in higher education were more likely than the general public to do drugs, and it wouldn't surprise me of that was true.