The Best American Sports Writing 2016 by Rick Telander

Author:Rick Telander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

If there is an epicenter for the heroin-in-sports crisis, it’s Albuquerque (population 550,000), a high-altitude city less than 300 miles from the Mexican border. A report by the New Mexico health department found that the drug-overdose death rate in the state jumped by more than 60 percent between 2001 and ’10, and in New Mexico’s Youth Risk and Resiliency survey one in 10 youths admitted to using opiate-based prescription drugs to get high. In Albuquerque at least eight athletes have died from heroin or painkiller overdoses since ’11. (The very week in April that Sports Illustrated visited the city to report this story, a former local baseball star, James Diz, died of an apparent heroin overdose at 23.)

Cameron Weiss was a strapping wrestler and football special-teams player at La Cueva High. In 2010, his sophomore year, he broke his left collarbone making a tackle in practice and required surgery; months later he fractured his right collarbone while wrestling. He went on pain medication (Percocet and hydrocodone) and was soon ditching school and failing the AP classes he had been mastering. He confessed to his mother that he was addicted to heroin. Because of a federal law that prevents doctors from prescribing buprenorphine, a component of Suboxone, to more than 100 patients at a time, Jennifer Weiss-Burke had to call 80 physicians before she could get her son an appointment for a Suboxone prescription. On the drive to the doctor’s, Cameron went into severe withdrawal. He was “combative, sweating, in a ton of pain,” Jennifer says. “He was throwing up. He looked horrible.”

Cameron’s body had come to need the sustained opioid intake. Once he received the Suboxone, his withdrawal symptoms vanished. “After 15 minutes it was like he was normal again—laughing and happy,” says his mother. But then she learned the reality of addiction: sobriety can be fleeting. Soon her son was using again. “It was a living hell,” she says. He died of a heroin overdose at 18.

Lou Duran can relate. She watched her son, Michael, make the varsity baseball team at Sandia Prep as an eighth-grader and, two years later, become addicted to OxyContin after he strained his knee playing soccer. Michael hardly fit the profile of an addict: He spent hours hitting balls in a batting cage with teammates. He excelled academically. Owing to his blend of intelligence and athleticism, Lou called him her “Einstein jock.”

Because of his addiction, though, his baseball career unraveled. He was kicked out of private school, went to public school, and then dropped out. After earning his GED, he went to San Diego City College, but he quickly transferred to New Mexico State in Las Cruces. Then he began using heroin. He went to rehab and attended therapy, only to relapse five times. Lou and her husband, Michael Sr., rode waves of terror followed by temporary relief. They witnessed their son’s excruciating withdrawals and fleeting stretches of sobriety. Finally, in early 2011, Michael seemed to have broken free of the drug.

On February 1,

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