FORMER BOXER SPREADS HIS EXPERIENCE OF HOW DRUGS DAMAGE LIVES

Former reigning Canadian heavyweight boxing champion George Chuvalo
spread the message to Grimsby students: drugs are bad.

Chuvalo has had a long hard history with heroine, but he wasn't the
user: he lost three sons to the drug, as well as his wife, who
committed suicide after the deaths of two of his sons.

He was at Grimsby Secondary School on Thursday, September 14, to tell
his story and warn teens about the dangers of drugs.

At the age of twenty his youngest son Jesse shot himself, and George
said it was because of the agony of his addiction. Jesse had been
addicted to heroine for nine months before he, as George told the
kids, put the gun in his mouth and took his life.

Only a few months later his son George Lee took his life as well. It
was out of grief, and a desire to be with his brother.

In a video he showed to the students, he said, "You just can't
believe that your son is dead."

He added that it was hard to function, it was like breathing in the
grief each time he took a breath.

That left George with two sons and one daughter. At the time of the
video his son Steven had been in jail, and had spent nearly five
years of his life there for crimes he did to get heroine.

But George's words after the video were what caught the students.

"Both of my sons would be craving it so badly that they would see a
flash of it in the dealer's hands, they would defecate in their
pants...They would shoot it into their waiting veins (after returning
home) and only then would they clean themselves up."

After the video was filmed, Steven was released from jail, and was
staying with his sister in Toronto while George was out of the
country. His sister left him for a day with $100 and some cigarettes.
When she returned there was a key in the door but the chain lock was
drawn and she had to get the police to break in.

"They found my son's body slumped in the chair...head lodged down
beside a desk, needle still sticking out of his arm," George said.

It took Steven seven seconds to die, not even long enough to light
the cigarette that was still in his hand at the time. He died of an
overdose at the age of 35.

George had been in the states training a boxer for a big fight, when
he came home he saw his new wife at the air port terminal. She didn't
have the joyous look she normally had upon his return, instead she
had a look of despair.

He asked her twice what the problem was, and twice she answered
quietly, "We have to talk."

"So I made it easy for her, I said, 'Steven's dead isn't he?' and she
nodded her head," he told the students.

He said during the fight (which Steven was watching on tv) he was
thinking 'My beautiful son are you dead or alive? My beautiful son
are you dead or alive?'

"Even though I know I lost two sons to heroine, before Steven died,
when I saw him in jail...I believed he could beat heroine," George said.

After losing most of his family to this drug in one way or another,
George said he's still standing. With a new wife and her children,
along with his remaining kids, Vanessa and Mitchell, George is now
spreading the message to teens, as well as adults, that drugs are
more than bad - they're deadly.

George said that if there is some sort of afterlife he can only hope
that his sons would want their story told, including the gory
details, so that other young people (because that's when addictions
often begin) know the ramifications.

He said he once saw a girl on television say that when she started
doing drugs she didn't know there was a bad side. Only the glamourous
sexy side.

But she said, and George agrees, kids don't realize the shame and
humiliation of drug addiction.