'HANDSOME, ARTICULATE' - AND DEAD

Boxing Great George Chuvalo Takes Aim At Heroin's 'Glamour'

George Chuvalo is doing his best to beat Hollywood's image of the
glamourous heroin addict to a pulp.

As he did in the ring against foes like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier,
the Canadian boxing legend is fighting through nearly unfathomable
blows, this time of personal tragedy, to warn students that
Tinseltown's take on smack is way off mark.

When picturing heroin addicts, he urges them to not think of handsome
John Travolta's portrayal in Pulp Fiction, but rather the pathetic
reality of the three of four sons he lost to the drug.

Like son George Lee, gripping the sides of a toilet bowl, sick from
withdrawal, "screaming at the top of his lungs," begging for drugs
while crying and vomiting through his mouth and nose.

Like George Lee and eldest son Steven, so desperate for a fix that
they instantly soiled their pants when a dealer flashed a packet of
heroin they were soon injecting in a hotel washroom, excrement still
running down their legs.

Or the pair initially eluding police following a drug store robbery,
only to be caught after passing out on a busy Toronto sidewalk, one
on top of the other, after swallowing mouthfuls of pills.

Or Steven, convincing his father to stop at a drug store for "gum" on
the way to a rehab clinic, returning to the car having knocked over
the pharmacist to steal what he thought was Demerol -- but turned out
to be vitamins.

Steven, the son who seemed set to break from his brothers' fate,
found slumped over a table in his underwear in his sister's
apartment, unlit cigarette between the first two fingers of his right
hand, a needle stuck in his left arm.

Out of jail for drug-related robberies for just 11 days, his sister,
Vanessa, had left him $100 and a pack of cigarettes when she'd gone
for an overnight trip the afternoon before.

He scored the heroin shortly after her departure.

"Before my son could even light a cigarette he was dead. It takes
about seven seconds," Chuvalo told a rapt audience at Sir Allan
MacNab Secondary School.

"I think my son was handsome, articulate and... very compassionate.
He was nice when he was off drugs. When he was on drugs it was
another kettle of fish."

The Chuvalo family's heroin nightmare began with youngest son Jesse,
who at 20 first tried the drug to dull the pain from a severe leg
injury from a dirt bike accident.

That was in May 1984. By that September, Jesse and older brothers
George Lee and Steven had all become addicts.

In February of the next year, Jesse took his own life while in a
state of despair about his addiction.

"My son Jesse, just nine months after becoming a heroin addict, took
a 22-caliber rifle, lodged it against the roof of his mouth, pulled
the trigger and sealed not only his own fate, but the fate of two of
his brothers and his mother."

George Lee deliberately overdosed eight years later, apparently
hoping to join Jesse in heaven. He'd been released from the latest of
a string of jail terms for drug-related robberies four days earlier.

The death was too much for their mother, Lynn. Two days after George
Lee's funeral, she overdosed on pills she'd confiscated from her sons
over the years.

Chuvalo returned home to find her on Jesse's bed, cradling his
cremated remains.

"My wife couldn't stand the pain of losing a second son," he said.

"I think a mother feels pain differently than a father. A mother has
a nine-month head start on love. A mother's belly swells with love
for nine months. A baby suckles at his or her mother's breasts. The
relationship between a mother and child is different than the father
and child."

Chuvalo spent the next nine months in bed before rebounding to
eventually remarry and start his anti-drug crusade.

But tragedy struck yet again when Steven overdosed in August 1996, a
month before he was set to join his dad's campaign.

Steven had planned to warn about the slippery slope of drug use that
can lead to hard-core addiction.

His life - and those of his two brothers - will instead serve as a
cautionary tale.

"If you ever even flirt with idea of doing drugs, I hope you think of
me, George Chuvalo, and what drugs did to my family," Chuvalo told students.

"Doing drugs is not all glamourous," he said. "The general message
(from Hollywood) is that you can do drugs and get away with it, that
you can do drugs and carry on business as usual.

"That is a load of bunk, a load of crap."

Grade 10 student Ryan Chow called the talk, sponsored by the Canadian
Auto Workers union, "awesome."

"It was so powerful. It put a whole different perspective on drugs,"
he said as he lined up for an autograph. "It kind of seems dumb now."