Recovering Drug Addict: 'We All Start in Same Place'

It was just a little drinking and smoking on the weekends in high school.

It was just a little cocaine offered by a friend in college.

It was just one little yellow pill during the offseason.

Then it was a career down the tubes.

Then it was two drug overdoses, one of which was heart-stopping.

Then it was a family that turned away because of too much pain.

For more than an hour, Chris Herren, a once-heralded high school basketball star, college hoops standout and second round National Basketball Association draft pick, told his story to hundreds of audience members Monday night at West Morris Central High School.

Herren’s story started off the way so many do in affluent areas around the country. The son of a Massachusetts politician whose dream was to play basketball at the highest level spent his adolescence under a microscope. From the age of 14 he was being watched by some of college hoops most legendary coaches.

“I had a lot of pressure on me from a young age,” Herren said in a pronounced New England accent. “I thought a little bit of smoking and drinking on the weekends would never be a problem.”

Just as intriguing as Herren’s battle with drugs, which took him from smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol as a teen to snorting cocaine in his Boston College dorm room and nearly missing the tip as the starting point guard for his hometown Boston Celtics to get high on Oxycodone, was the grip his addiction had, and how he truly believed he’d never get to rock bottom.

“What kids don’t see,” Herren said, “is how drug addicts get to that end result. They look at addicts and see dirty, ugly people, and never think that will be them. But they all start in the same place. No one grows up and says ‘I want to be a heroin addict,’ or ‘I want to get hooked on pills one day.’

“We all begin with sneaking a little liquor from our parents,” Herren continued. “We have [teenage] parties in the basement of our houses with the parents upstairs that allow it, and everyone thinks it’s OK.”

Herren, now 37 and a father of three, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and did whatever it took to get high, from the U.S. to Italy and Istanbul, where he played basketball in the 2000s.

His sobriety date is Aug. 1, 2008, and says that while the worst days of his life are hopefully behind him, he would not have changed the path he took.

It’s that path that has allowed him to speak on a national stage for the past three years to hundreds of thousands of parents and students alike, explaining what he went through, and how both young and old can stop addiction before it starts.

‘Wish My Kid Listened’

Herren’s presentation to the community,

Herren’s target audience is anyone who will listen, but since his journey of descent began as a teen, he focuses on making a difference in that age group.

And drug addiction, the recovering addict says, can affect anyone.

"We were all kids of lawyers, doctors, politicians," Herren said about his high school basketball team. "Six of the 15 members got hooked on heroin."

Just one day before failing his first college drug test, Herren and his basketball teammates listened to a former professional athlete speak about the dangers of substance abuse.

But Herren didn’t listen.

Herren spent 28 days in a Utah treatment center later in his college career to hopefully shake his cocaine addiction.

But again, he didn’t listen.

After being drafted by the Denver Nuggets and surrounded with teammates and coaches who wouldn’t let him go near alcohol and drugs, protecting Herren from himself, the successful rookie was traded to his hometown Boston Celtics for his sophomore season. A dream come true.

Unfortunately, the move put him back in contact with old high school friends headed down the wrong track.

And despite the help from the Nuggets organization, Herren didn’t listen.

“That’s the most common email I get from parents,” the affable speaker said. “They tell me, ‘I wish my kid listened to you, because now they’re hooked on this or that.’ ”

But how do you stop your kids from doing the wrong thing; how do they just say no, one parent asked.

They need to have the self-esteem and self-worth to be strong enough to say no, Herren said. The teen needs to be confident and happy with who they are.

“The beauty of sobriety is that you’re always the same person,” Herren said. “Drinking, doing drugs – it’s an escape from you being you twenty-four-seven.”

Herren pointed out more people are dying from prescription pill use at twice the rate of heroin and cocaine combined annually, and that a half million people will try their first pill each year.

Herren’s oldest child is now 14, and he says the conversation about substance abuse has already begun.

“I’m not naïve to think my kid won’t come home drunk one night,” he said. “I know he’s going to be faced with those situations, and I pray he makes the right choices. And that’s a conversation that has to continue.”