Canzano: A pit stop on the road to the Final Four
"One minute at a time."
It’s been 14 years since I heard from the self-proclaimed “junkie” in my phone contacts known only as “R,” but I sent another text on Wednesday morning, hoping for a reply.
I do that every couple of years.
I never get a reply.
Years ago, on a Friday afternoon, I had Chris Herren on my radio show. I’d covered the basketball player in college and the NBA. Herren had struggled with alcohol abuse as a teenager and spiraled into an opioid addiction in his 20s.
“It’s the devil in disguise,” Herren told me. “People’s vision of a heroin addict is a guy sleeping, drooling, you know — dirty — but that’s his last day. I was doing it with the Celtics and Nuggets. I couldn’t function without it. I wasn’t getting out of bed in the morning without it. I wasn’t going to bed without it.”
A day after that interview aired, I heard from a 24-year-old college student at Oregon State who identified himself only as “R.” He explained that he’d had a bumpy ride as a child. He was raised by his grandmother. Life had been hard. He’d first tried heroin when he was just 20.
“I’m a mess,” he wrote.