THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF THE DOT-COM WORLD

Drug Use Is Rampant In The High-Tech Work Force, Experts And Industry
Insiders Say. One Young Internet Star's Death Sheds Light On A Frenetic
Culture That Fuels The Problem.

At age 26, Aaron Bunnell was riding the fastest wave of the New Economy.

The son of a technology media baron, Bunnell propelled the fledgling Web
site Upside.com into a daily hot spot for Internet news, and pulled
all-nighters pumped with caffeine and uppers.

When he wasn't working 100-hour weeks, he was partying with Silicon Valley's
elite at digerati events, scattered across the sprawling haze of new money
in Northern California.

The dot-com wave carried him in mid-July from San Francisco to New York City
on a business trip, where long days of work on a new venture melted into
equally long nights of partying. And ultimately, on July 16, into a toxic
combination of alcohol, Valium and heroin.

A waiter at the posh Waldorf-Astoria Hotel discovered Bunnell dead in Room
1443 late the next morning, lying in bed with an empty bottle of champagne
nearby.

"I believe my son was a victim of the dot-com boom," said David Bunnell, the
53-year-old chief executive of Upside Media, which publishes print and
online technology industry magazines. "I knew he was drinking a lot and
taking uppers to stay awake. I didn't think it was much of a problem. I
didn't see it."

Like the drug waves that swept through places like Haight-Ashbury in the
1960s and Wall Street in the '80s, drug use has found a new, eager home in
the centers of technology.

The digital revolution has transformed Northern California into the valley
of riches, where hope for an explosive stock offering fuels fast deals,
faster cars and the fastest computer chips in the world.

But the combination of excessive wealth, driving ambition and a youthful
sense of invulnerability has created fertile ground for some of society's
most expensive, and dangerous, highs.

While illicit drug activity wanes nationwide, drug use--particularly
methamphetamine and powder cocaine--is booming among high-tech workers,
according to scores of interviews with chemical dependency experts, computer
programmers, technology executives and former drug addicts.

"Drugs are the dirty little secret of the dot-com world," said Dr. Alex
Stalcup, medical director of the New Leaf Treatment Center in Concord,
Calif., which gets 40% of its new patients from the technology world.

"It makes sense, really. 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."

It's too early for formal studies that quantify the problem, but there are
ominous signs of its growing proportions.

The San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force, for instance, has seen the amount
of cocaine seized jump 173% between 1995 and 1999, while the quantity of
methamphetamine seized has skyrocketed 678%.

In Wise County, N.C., home to tech hub Research Triangle, the sheriff's
office has seen the amount of methamphetamine seized increase by more than
6,000% between 1997 and 1999, while deputies have confiscated 45% more
cocaine.

And last week, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had seized 125,904
pounds of cocaine in the just-ended fiscal year, an all-time annual record.

The young people who are vital to the high-tech work force were mere
toddlers during the cocaine epidemic of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and
are repeating the mistakes of the past.

The number of people age 19 to 28 who say they use powder cocaine jumped by
one-third between 1994 and 1999, the University of Michigan Institute for
Social Research found. And escalating numbers of young tech workers are
seeking treatment for drug addictions.

While most dot-commers eschew public clinics and 12-step programs such as
Cocaine Anonymous, they are flooding into private treatment centers in the
Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and New York.

The doctors who run these programs say the number of patients they see from
the computer industry has grown exponentially since just two years ago, when
technology workers were a rare sight.

It is relatively easy to hide all but the most extreme problems, say medical
experts.

Most technology firms in Northern California, fearing they will lose
hard-to-replace employees, refuse to drug-test their workers. Among Silicon
Valley's top tech employers, only chip maker Intel Corp. screens prospective
workers for illegal substances.

Indeed, weeks after David Bunnell learned that his son had died, the chief
executive declined to implement a pre-employment drug-testing policy.

"What people do in their own time, in the privacy of their own homes, is not
our business," Bunnell said. "We have a policy that we don't want people to
be stoned at work, but there is a lot to do here. There's no time to slow
down."

Open Drug Use Raises No Eyebrows

Parties abound south of Market Street, the heart of San Francisco's hottest
dot-com locale, and elsewhere throughout the city. On a recent Friday night,
workers fled their cubicles and loft-like offices to cram into the
Merchant's Exchange Club.

Vodka flowed easily and heavily on the 15th floor of this California Street
skyscraper. A hip-hop beat throbbed through the ballroom, luring women in
alligator pants and men in Armani chic toward the deejay's turntable.

Two women slinked off to the bathroom and found a quiet corner, away from
the harsh fluorescent light. As one woman pulled out a compact and checked
her lipstick, the other withdrew from her purse a bullet-shaped vial.
Sliding the top to one side, she tapped out a small mound of white powder
onto her fingertip, lifted it to her nose and inhaled quickly.

She passed the vial to her friend. In between their delicate snorts, they
rehashed the latest gossip at their high-tech firm. Who got hired and fired.
Who made a fortune. Who lost it all.

Other women strolled through the bathroom. No one looked at the pair or
asked what they were doing. No one seemed to care.

"Everyone has coke, especially up north," said a chief executive of a Los
Angeles-based dot-com who recently relocated from San Francisco. "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. It's no big deal."

Socially, cocaine serves as shorthand proof of prosperity in increasingly
nervous times. The silicon success stories that once fed the
imagination--tales of brilliant young college students who took fledgling
companies public and awoke the next morning as multimillionaires--have been
replaced by accounts of layoffs and lost venture funding.

But instead of a pall hanging over Northern California, the good times just
roll on. Cocaine helps create the illusion of wealth, whether it's real or
not.

Technology workers say cocaine often is used with other party or "club"
drugs, such as Ecstasy and GHB, its unpredictable liquid cousin. Speed also
is popular, even during work hours, experts say.

"I see programmers who start their day by stirring meth into their cup of
coffee," said the Rev. Katherine O'Connell, a clinical psychologist and
interfaith minister in Capitola, Calif., who has treated thousands of
high-tech workers, politicians and executives for drug addiction since 1970.

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

Experts say the toxic combination that the New York City Medical Examiner's
Office found in Aaron Bunnell's body--alcohol, Valium and heroin--suggests
long-term abuse of stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine--even
though those drugs were not the direct cause of his death. The medical
examiner called Bunnell's death accidental, brought on by acute
intoxication.

"Virtually 100% [of stimulant users] begin to use downers--alcohol, Valium
or heroin--to sleep," said Dr. Stalcup of the Concord treatment center. He
declined to comment specifically about the Bunnell case.

Although there are no statistics showing that drug and alcohol addiction
afflicts technology workers more than the general population, drug treatment
experts say tech workers are more susceptible than those in, say, Hollywood
or Wall Street because of their work.

Drug use by white-collar tech workers "makes the Wall Street boom, and the
excess that went along with it, look like puppy chow," said Nicholas Ney, a
Menlo Park clinical psychologist and addiction specialist. "The body count
is just starting."

Rebelliousness Is Part of the Problem

A potent work-hard, play-harder streak runs through the tech work force, as
does a free-thinking, rebellious attitude that resists strait-laced
corporate values.

"There's always been an anarchist technophile drug-use thing that seems to
go together," said Josh Fishman, a 26-year-old New York programmer who has
tried speed and "extra" doses of his Ritalin prescription to help make
deadlines or conquer code-writing challenges.

"You tinker with your own body and perceptions as well as with technology,"
he said. "There's the same romantic, opium-poet mystic theme in the hacker
culture that used to be in the Beat culture."

Network engineer Allan Arimoto's twin compulsions--work and coke--mixed
perilously when he worked at the now-defunct PC manufacturer Unitron
Computer USA in the city of Industry. Under pressure to prepare exhibits for
Comdex, the massive computer industry trade show held annually in Las Vegas,
Arimoto fell off the wagon and showed up three days late. He resigned on the
spot.

Clean for more than a year, Arimoto, 37, now handles computer tasks at the
Cri-Help rehab program in North Hollywood.

"My work habits are as sick as my drug habits," he said. "I could work for
three days straight, no sleep, writing programs, tweaking on computer
parts."

Cocaine always has followed the money, say addiction specialists. That's
why, in the 1980s, coke flowed from the banking and stock-trading world of
New York to the companies and industries they invested in elsewhere.

Today, the Bay Area is ground zero of the Internet economy and all its
excesses, with its frenetic night life and sky-high rents.

Just 30 years ago, San Francisco also was the home of the nation's drug
culture--a mix of psychedelics and social change and dreams of a brave new
world. Today, the drug of choice is cocaine, and the movement's hero is not
the Grateful Dead or Timothy Leary, but the Gordon Gecko character in the
movie "Wall Street."

In West Los Angeles, where entertainment dot-com companies crowd the
coastline, workers say they, too, have seen a boom in cocaine use among
their peers.

"Want to know how easy it is to score a gram of coke? My friend and I
recently went to a bar in Venice Beach where everyone there was a
dot-commer," said a public relations manager for a Los Angeles entertainment
firm. "My friend asked the doorman where she could get some coke. One minute
and $60 later, she had a gram."

Similar tales can be heard in New York, where Silicon Alley and the related
financial industry have grown flush because of the Internet. Dr. Arnold M.
Washton, who runs a private New York addiction treatment center for
executives and professionals, said he has seen a resurgence of cocaine use
among his patients.

One of them, a 27-year-old computer programmer for a dot-com, says she
became a regular cocaine user as part of her office's social routine. At
least three nights a week, she and colleagues would meet after work at a bar
and one member of the group would bring cocaine for everyone, Washton said.
They would drink until 2 a.m., then go to someone's apartment and do cocaine
until 5 a.m., he said.

A few hours later, still reeling from the drugs, the group would show up for
work.

"The person she reports to is part of this crowd," Washton said. "Now that
she's in treatment, people are asking her, 'Why don't you come out and party
with us?' She's getting worried that now that she doesn't want to use
anymore, she may lose her job."

Friends Recall Early Drug Use

Though Aaron Bunnell's pursuit of his dot-com dreams ended in Room 1443 of
the Waldorf-Astoria, the path to his demise began in college. Friends say he
began experimenting with pharmaceutical drugs as an undergraduate film
student at USC.

"He worked so hard. Everyone knew that he put in long hours," said Roxana C.
Reyes, a former girlfriend. "But he didn't start using anything stronger
than pot or painkillers until he moved to San Francisco to be with his dad."

David Bunnell, a well-known tech publishing figure who founded PC World and
MacWorld magazines, wanted to expand Upside's Web presence. It was 1998 and
the dot-com boom was just beginning.

After graduating from USC with a bachelor's degree, where he was named
director of the year, Aaron was lured north by the promise of working on the
Web. Family members and friends say he also wanted to spend time with his
father, whom he had often seen during holidays and long summer vacations
after his parents divorced in his youth.

"He was always so clean, I never worried about him getting into serious
drugs," said David Bunnell. "His mother's a drug and alcohol counselor. We
never saw this coming."

Usually dressed in his favorite baggy trousers, with his stereo blaring out
rock tunes, Aaron regularly pulled 15-hour days at the privately held
company, say co-workers. He often worked on the site all night, sleeping on
the floor or at a nearby hotel.

Slowly, the Web site staff grew from five to a team of more than 20. In late
1999, Aaron was promoted to vice president and editorial director of
Upside's entire online business.

Soon thereafter, he began leaving work to drink at a nearby bar, returning
to the office to work while inebriated.

"It was pretty clear he had a substance-abuse problem," said a former Upside
editorial staffer. "Given the intensity of the [dot-com] community, it's not
surprising."

Even the online tribute to Aaron from colleagues and other friends betrays a
sense of imbalance in the world of cutting-edge technology and its drive to
one-up the competition. The opening line of the tribute reads, "Aaron
Bunnell never said 'no.' "

Mourners praised Bunnell's ability to work an insane schedule, "putting in
long hours and immersing himself in the task." Many wished he had "come out
to play" with them, while others wondered why he didn't spend more time
"chillaxing and marinating."

No one mentioned drug use, or questioned what price Bunnell was paying for
his long hours of work.

Gini Talmadge, Upside Media president and Aaron Bunnell's boss, declined to
discuss her former employee or how his death has affected the company. "We
do not want you to do this story. Let it go," Talmadge said. "We don't have
the desire or time to talk about this."

For sentimental reasons, the company has not taken the time to update its
phone system. It is the only recording of Aaron's voice the family has, his
father said.

Almost three months after Aaron Bunnell's death, his voicemail at work is
still taking messages.

"Hi, this is Aaron at Upside Online," says a tired-sounding Bunnell. "I'm
going to be out of the office this week, so send me an e-mail message and
I'll get back to you."