By Patrick May and Heather Somerville / San Jose Mercury News
For Google executive Forrest Timothy Hayes, heroin was the killer app.
From the way the Santa Cruz 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 surely horrific. But it was particularly chilling for another reason:
While the seven-minute-long death scene drew a final curtain on the life of the father of five, it raised another on a dark and largely hidden side of Silicon Valley in 2014. With a booming startup culture cranked up by fiercely 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 here in the world’s frothy fountain of tech.
Illicit drugs such as cocaine, seen above, and black-market painkillers have become part of the landscape among Silicon Valley. (Photo by
Acid Pix/Flickr Creative Commons)
“And it’s a lot worse than what people think because it’s all covered up so well,” says Estes. “If it gets out that a company’s employees are doing drugs, it paints a horrible picture.”
Hayes’ overdose last November — alleged 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 all.
While precise numbers of techie drug users are impossible to come by, most treatment and addiction experts see evidence of a growing problem borne of 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.”
Furthering 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.”
Patients prescribed opioids for back pain or injuries can easily become addicted; others get opioids on a thriving black market, or easier yet, from the medicine cabinet of a family member or friend.
Dave Marlon, president of Nevada-based treatment center Solutions Recovery Inc., which has treated tech workers from across the country, says, “Some people say they need to take opioids in the morning just to function and go to work. It’s like drowning and you need air.”
