Chris Herren
Benefitting The Herren Project
NBA player Chris Herren was spending $20,000 a month on Oxycontin, which then turned to heroin. Overdoses, car crashes and hospitalizations couldn’t keep him from destroying his career, his family, his entire life. Now fourteen years sober, Chris travels the country speaking to middle school and high school students about the dangers of drug addiction, and parents about what actually works to keep their kids from falling prey to the lure of substance abuse.
P.S. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and we're ending Season 3 with an "ASK KIMI ANYTHING" episode.
You can ask Kimi anything about her experience with bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder (or anything else for that matter) and she'll tell you the truth “on air.” Why, because we believe that when we tell our truth, we create awareness and contribute to healing.
Call us at 833-326-8623 and leave Kimi a voicemail by May 4th!
Wise Words
I learned at a young age that if I played well, my family seemed to be happier.
I was subjected to the drug testing and that came up positive at 18, and it completely broke my family’s heart because they realized really quickly that their McDonald’s All-American son can’t abstain, he can’t stay away.
I’m spending around $20,000 a month on Oxycontin. The pill I had never heard of, the pill that they referred to as Hillbilly Heroin is taking every single penny out of not only my pocket, but my family’s pocket.
But then my wife opened the mail one day, I didn’t catch the mailman. Here she is, 23 years old, young mom, and she finds out that I had just burned through $250,000 of our money over a year and a half stretch and that there was really nothing left in the bank.
I’m a 6’2” white kid. You know what I mean? I wasn’t blessed with unbelievable athletic ability. I needed every ounce of myself to be invested into that professional career if I was going to be able to sustain it. I wasn’t willing, nor was my addiction. So, I was released.
Every day, I would leave my home and I would go in the morning and pretend that it was coffee that was calling me, but it was coffee plus an enormous amount of heroin and opiates.
I didn’t think that I would ever do enough to kill me. I was in the drive-through and I overdosed, I took my foot off the brake and I bumped the lady in front of me, which alerted her to get out of her car. She saw me slumped over the wheel, and they called the ambulance. Once they opened that door and pulled me out, they saw empty bags of heroin and syringes in my car.
That day not only changed my life, it changed everybody who loved me. From that day forward, no one was ever going to be the same again.
At 32 years old in a hospital room with a newborn baby, my wife in bed and my two children, I just felt like I didn’t belong there. I was adding nothing to their life. If anything, I was just taking. I was constantly taking from them, I was constantly letting them down, constantly putting my children in a position of fear. Zero stability.
To me, it’s glaringly obvious that I’d say 90% of the parents in America that catch their kids drinking and smoking for the first time, they don’t ask them why. They want to focus on where they got it, who bought it for them, when did they do it and who were they with and what did they consume, rather than just a simple why.
I think the word rock bottom has done so much damage to the recovery world. There is no reason to wait.
LINKS
Websites:
Facebook: Chris Herren
Instagram/Twitter:
Charity Donation: Herren Project