"Because you never see anyone, you're going to either be a complete liar, or completely, completely honest," Jake says. "I'd found my bottom and knew I needed to quit, so I was very willing to soak up the sobriety." But while his group began with nine people, by the end of their eight-week session only Jake and another man remained.

Jake feels the dropout rate is on par with what he's experienced at N.A. meetings. But Jeff Schaler, the author of "Addiction Is a Choice" and a psychologist who teaches at American University, asserts that eGetgoing's "one size fits all" approach is "doomed to fail."

"EGetgoing views the addict population as homogenous," Schaler says. "We know for a fact that the addict population is a heterogeneous one: that is, everyone uses drugs and alcohol for different reasons, in different ways, and with different results. eGetgoing's program doesn't appear to look at the psychological aspects that drive people to addiction."

John Avery, the public policy director of NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals, and a licensed social worker specializing in addiction, feels eGetgoing's therapeutic process raises some important questions. "It's an impressive site and the board of advisors is full of great minds from the field [of addiction treatment]," he says. "But there's a barrier here to interpersonal communication and interaction. How do you gauge someone's level of anger or indifference if you can't see them? What makes group therapy so therapeutic is that people get together in one place and have to interact with each other. This skews that interaction."

Jerry, a 60-year-old retired construction worker from Livermore, Calif., enrolled in eGetgoing for aftercare once he was released from a CRC residential treatment center in Scotts Valley, Calif., last May. "A few [people in the eGetgoing group] thought, This isn't the real thing, and dropped out," says Jerry, who's a recovering alcoholic. "Or they came in loaded or drunk. But I have news for them. They didn't give it a chance. Of the people who stayed with it, I'd say they think the world of it."

Jerry was so pleased with the support system he found at eGetgoing, he followed up his first session with another. "I couldn't have gotten sober just by using eGetgoing," he admits. "Some people like me need to physically be around other addicts to get better. But you learn so much in this program. It's total information -- what drugs do to your body, what they do to your brain. And learning is power, right?"

Barry Karlin hopes teens will think learning about drugs is cool, too. TeenGetgoing --with its pulsating dance music, vivid colors and hip fonts -- launched last November. Seven school districts in four states are currently using it. It's still too early to tell if the program will boost recovery rates for teens -- historically one of the most difficult groups of drug abusers to treat -- but so far, teen clients have logged on to the site 150 times.

While eGetgoing's site relies on lengthy FAQs that can be frustratingly slow to open even through a DSL line, teenGetgoing moves at warp speed and offers polls ("Do you have trouble saying no to pot?") and video presentations of the site's two programs. "Aware" educates teens about the dangers of drug use, and "Discover" features clips of teen actors using or getting drugs. A dramatization of a group therapy session is careful to include a character everyone can relate to: the angry, hoodie-wearing Eminem type, a pasty-faced nerd, the popular girl who doesn't understand why people think she has a problem.

"You're in trouble if you don't tell kids upfront that the kids they see in the videos are actors," notes Jacklyn Guevara, director of alternative education in the Eastside Union High School District in San Jose, where more than 100 students have been participating in teenGetgoing's pilot program since the fall. Guevara says students were disappointed at first that they weren't going to be viewing the confessions of real druggies and gangstas and spent more time critiquing the actors' clothes than listening to the dialogue.

"I just told them to pay attention to the scripts, that they're based on real life," she says. "After that, they seemed to relate to it."

Guevara estimates three-fourths of the nearly 1,000 alternative education students she oversees are involved with some sort of drug use. Because most school budgets allow for only one counselor on staff, or none at all, Guevara jumped at the chance to have students participate in teenGetgoing's pilot program. When it ends later this month, Guevara says she will gauge from student evaluations how helpful it's been. "So far, I think the program's outstanding, but I need to make sure it makes a difference in kids' lives," she says.

That seems to be the consensus: Organizations such as the National Institute on Drug Abuse and SAMHSA have chosen not to comment on eGetgoing, citing a lack of empirical data. Even eGetgoing's management isn't certain how successful it's been. Graduates are tracked only through a series of phone calls for one year (and can opt out of participating). Data on how many people have managed to stay sober is still being collected.

"The only thing really novel about [eGetgoing] is its medium," says Peter Graham, an expert on addiction and the director of psychology services at the Professional Renewal Center in Lawrence, Kan. "It's got everything else that other treatment centers have, except for a physical presence."

And just how crucial is it for counselors to make eye contact with their patients? Or notice that someone is tapping a foot, staring out the window, or nodding off? At this point, the jury's still out.

"I don't want to prejudge eGetgoing and say it can't be effective," NAADAC's Avery says. "After all, 100 years ago, no one believed that Freud's talk therapy would work, either. But face-to-face counseling sessions provide the opportunity for personal reinforcement -- echoing what someone's saying, mirroring their body language. And how do you get that from a computer rather than a person?"

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