Silicon Valley Breeds New Kind of Drug Abuser

With a booming startup culture cranked up by competitive VPs and adrenaline-driven coders and a tendency for stressed-out managers to look the other way, illicit drugs and black-market painkillers have become part of the landscape in Silicon Valley.

For Google executive Forrest Timothy Hayes, heroin was the killer app.

From the way the Santa Cruz, Calif., cops talk about it, the security-camera video that captured a reputed high-price call girl injecting the 51-year-old tech veteran with a fatal dose of the drug aboard his yacht in Santa Cruz was horrific.

But while the seven-minute death scene drew a final curtain on the life of the father of five, police say it also raised another on a largely hidden side of Silicon Valley in 2014. With a booming startup culture cranked up by competitive VPs and adrenaline-driven coders, and a tendency for stressed-out managers to look the other way, illicit drugs and black-market painkillers have become part of the landscape in the world’s frothy fountain of tech.

“I’ve had them from Apple, from Twitter, from Facebook, from Google, from Yahoo, and it’s bad out there,” says Cali Estes, a Miami-based addictions coach who has helped 200 tech workers — many of them high-level executives — struggling with everything from cocaine and heroin to painkillers such as oxycodone and stimulants such as Adderall, a prescription drug used to treat attention-deficit disorders.

“And it’s a lot worse than what people think because it’s all covered up so well,” Estes adds. “If it gets out that a company’s employees are doing drugs, it paints a horrible picture.”

Hayes’ overdose in November — suspected call girl Alix Tichelman was arrested in connection with his death — felt like an eerie tap on the shoulder. Most Bay Area residents tend to marvel at the innovation unfolding around them from the red-hot tech revival and do not fret about the shadowy behavior that might help propel it.

While precise numbers of techie drug users are not available, most treatment and addiction experts see evidence of a growing problem caused by a potent cocktail: newly minted wealth; intense competition between companies and among their workers; the deadline pressure of one product launch after another; and a robust regional black-market drug pipeline.

“There’s this workaholism in the valley, where the ability to work on crash projects at tremendous rates of speed is almost a badge of honor,” says Steve Albrecht, a San Diego consultant who teaches substance-abuse awareness for Bay Area employers. “These workers stay up for days and days, and many of them gradually get into meth and coke to keep going. Red Bull and coffee only gets them so far.”

Exacerbating the problem, many tech companies do little or no drug testing because, as Albrecht put it: “They want the results, but they don’t want to know how their employees got the results.”

Drug abuse in the tech industry is growing against the backdrop of a national surge in heroin and prescription pain-pill abuse. Treatment specialists say overprescribing painkillers, such as the opioid hydrocodone, has spawned a new crop of addicts: working professionals with college degrees, a description that fits many of the thousands of workers in corporate Silicon Valley.

The addiction ladder:

Dr. Norman Wall, a detox specialist who works with employees from companies such as Apple, says the progression up the addiction ladder is predictable: uppers such as Adderall to keep up with production demands and 12-hour days, followed by downers such as oxycodone, another powerful opioid, to take the edge off when you get home. “It’s not a big leap to get hooked on oxycodone,” he says.

But when the pills are no longer enough, people turn to heroin — first to smoke or snort, and then to inject, because they build a tolerance and need an ever-greater dose to get the same high.

Heroin is also an opioid, so the mind and body respond in much the same way they do to painkillers, but it’s much cheaper: about $20 for a half a gram, whereas some painkillers run $60 or more a pop, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). In the past five or six years, heroin has become more available throughout the Bay Area.

Heroin use more than doubled nationally from 2002 to 2012, according to a study of people 12 and older by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and is the second-most common drug abused, after alcohol, as reported by patients at treatment facilities in San Francisco. The DEA has reported an increase in heroin seizures in Santa Clara and surrounding counties from 6.3 pounds in 2012 to 22 pounds for the first half of this year.

The current surge of illicit drug use is not the Bay Area’s first — the 1960s were legendary. But it was in the dot-com era when the unique marriage of illicit drugs and tech-work really started to click, with fast money fueling the frenzy.

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