SILICON VALLEY FORTUNES "BUILT ON GREED AND FED BY COCAINE"

Excessive cocaine use by entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is making Wall
Street in the Eighties look like "child's play", according to industry
insiders.

The flipside to the successes of the internet boom is unprecedented drug
use, overwork and greed, doctors say.

For every Bill Gates character with his "geeky" image there are hundreds of
slick individuals modelling themselves on Gordon Gecko, the cocaine-snorting
stockbroker played by Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street.

"Drugs are the dirty little secret of the dot.com world," said Dr Alex
Stalcup, medical director of the New Leaf Treatment Centre in California.
Forty per cent of his admissions are such workers and the figure is rising.

"It makes sense, really," he said. "There's so much money, such long hours,
such pressure to perform here. It's speed to work on, coke to play on and
smoking heroin to come down on. I see programmers who start their day by
stirring meth [a cocaine derivative] into their coffee," said Katherine
O'Connell, a psychologist who has treated drug addiction since 1970.

"Their whole social life revolves around their work. If there's drug use at
work, then there's likely to be drug use when they play," she said.

"Everyone has coke," said a chief executive of an internet company in Los
Angeles. "If your friends don't have it or your banker doesn't have it, then
it's a phone call away. It's like ordering a Martini." Specific drug use has
marked every decade. In the Sixties, the Haight Ashbury district of San
Fransisco was the spiritual home of marijuana and LSD. But since the drug
cartels of Colombia and Mexico started importing and distributing cocaine in
the Seventies, its use has grown to epidemic proportions among the rich.
"There will always be a section of society ready to consume cocaine," said
Dr Robin Blaine.

"But the internet generation, with instant fortunes and youthful belief that
they are unassailable, have embraced the cocaine culture with unprecedented
vigour." Experts say that the excessive cocaine use during the Seventies and
Eighties when most internet millionaires were children, is nothing compared
to the present problem.

"These young people are repeating the mistakes of the past and, as happened
before, things will start to fall apart," said Dr Blaine.

Companies refusing to test workers for drugs, saying that they will lose too
many good staff do not help the problem. After the excesses of the Eighties,
the majority of Wall Street banks screen employees.

The drug revelations are the latest splinter in the hyped world of new
technology. Romantic tales of ingenious boys creating computer programmes
worth billions are being replaced with stories of failed dot.com ideas,
redundancies and a stall in venture capital.

"There's always been an anarchist technophile drug-use thing," said Josh
Fishman, a 26-year-old programmer. "You tinker with your own body and
perceptions as well as with technology."

Police seizures of cocaine have leapt 173 per cent between 1995 and 1999
while the amount of methamphetamine has rocketed by 678 per cent.