Use of illicit drugs becomes part of Silicon Valley's work culture
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.
"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 like oxycodone and stimulants like 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," says Estes. "If it gets out that a company's employees are doing drugs, it paints a horrible picture."
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