Muhammad Ali called him "...the toughest guy I ever fought." And George Chuvalo, who was Canadian heavyweight boxing champion for 21 years, is still demonstrating his toughness at 70 years old, traveling the world to tell parents and kids how drug addiction took the lives of three of his sons and, indirectly, the life of his wife. His tragic story makes it clear that the specter of drug addiction looms over anyone foolish enough to experiment with addictive narcotics, and how anyone who is addicted needs a successful drug rehab program now, not later.
The story that George Chuvalo tells covers a decade of serious family troubles that center around the fatal addictions to heroin suffered by three of his four sons, and the tragic suicide of his wife while in the depths of grief from her loss.
Jesse, the youngest, committed suicide in 1985. Jesse had become dependent on prescribed narcotic pain killers while in hospital for a shattered knee sustained in a motorcycle accident. After leaving the hospital, he was offered heroin by a friend to help the pain, and his real addiction began. When he could no longer deal emotionally with his terrible secret, he took his own life – only nine months after his motorcycle accident. The family was devastated. They’d never known he was a heroin addict and never had the opportunity to help him through a successful drug rehab program. Jesse Chuvalo was 20.
During the next eight years, father George was in the biggest fight of his life, struggling to save his second and third sons Georgie Lee and Steven. Both young men had developed narcotic addictions independently of their kid brother Jesse, and both nearly died from repeated overdoses. Eventually they were imprisoned for stealing narcotics from a local drugstore to feed their habits. George made it his mission in life to save his boys from heroin, but all attempts at drug rehab for both brothers proved futile – they would run always quit or run away to get more drugs.
Georgie Lee, just four weeks after being released from prison, was found dead of a heroin overdose in a seedy Toronto hotel. Georgie Lee was 30. Steven, 32, was still serving time. And two days after Georgie Lee's funeral, Chuvalo's wife Lynne committed suicide, overcome by the grief of losing first Jesse, and now Georgie Lee.
The final blow to the family came three years later. Steven Chuvalo, only two weeks after release from prison and apparently doing well after drug rehab, was found dead by his sister Vanessa with a syringe in his arm and an unlit cigarette in his hand. He was 35 years old, survived by his then 9 year old son Jesse and 14 year old daughter Rachel.
George Chuvalo, known as the boxer who was never knocked off his feet in 93 pro fights, who went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali, managed to stay standing one more time and formed George Chuvalo's Fight Against Drugs, an organization dedicated to keeping young people off drugs. Now more than a decade after the tragedies, the ex-fighter is still taking his crusade around the country to high schools, middle schools and juvenile detention centers with his message: Stay away from drugs and alcohol, respect your bodies, your minds and your futures. And Chuvalo's new wife Joanne counsels addicts and parents over the phone and in person, helping when needed to get people into and through a successful drug rehab program.
Christian Drug Rehab Center
Organized psychiatry and major pharmaceutical companies, with the help and blessing of the Bush administration, are busy turning America’s future generations into drug-addicts with shattered self-images and life-long labels as mentally defective. If they can survive the common psychiatric drug side-effects of suicide, some may live long enough to recover their lives through drug detox and drug rehab programs.
The criminal assault on children in the name of profit began in earnest when the psychiatric-pharmaceutical lobbies pushed the Bush government into recommending the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC) in 2003, which, among a host of changes to the mental health system, adopted universal mental illness screening and prescribing of psych drugs where allegedly needed for all Americans from the age of zero up to the oldest living citizen. This just adds to the problem of 22 million Americans already needing drug rehab.
The most controversial recommendation is screening school children in all 50 states under the TeenScreen program, and the adoption in many states of programs like the Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP), a treatment plan that orders the use of new, expensive and mostly untested psychiatric drugs on all kids “diagnosed" with mental disorders - but only on kids who’s families are covered by public health care programs such as Medicaid. In other words, if they can pay, they gotta play. It’s doubtful Medicaid will cover the drug rehab they need later.
The result has been massive, forced and wholesale drugging of millions of children across the country with addictive and dangerous drugs, all but one of which have never received FDA approvals for use on children. Only one - Prozac - has ever scraped through an FDA approval for kids, but it’s been associated with destructive behavior since the 1980s. This cannot help but mean that millions of young people actually require drug rehab to achieve a normal life. But the label of mental illness cannot be erased - it will stick forever.
TeenScreen is not free, either. It’s costing tax payers a big bundle. On November 17, 2004, the University of South Florida announced the receipt of a grant of $98,641 from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to expand the TeenScreen program in the Tampa Bay area. Florida Medicaid is also being hijacked. The St. Petersburg Times reported earlier this year that, in the last 7 years, the cost to taxpayers for psych drugs prescribed to kids soared nearly 500%, and cost Medicaid $1,800 per child in 2006. Of course, the program isn’t paying for all the drug detox and drug rehab programs for those who wake up and try to escape the psych-drug collar and leash.
Drug detox for a whole rainbow of drugs?
It’s well documented that both TMAP and TeenScreen have been heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And the list of drugs being pushed on kids are enough to give a drug detox or drug rehab counselor a migraine. Kids are being force-fed new generations of SSRI antidepressant drugs including Prozac and Cymbalta by Eli Lilly; Paxil marketed by GlaxoSmithKline; Zoloft by Pfizer; Celexa and Lexapro from Forest Laboratories; Effexor by Wyeth, as well as generic versions sold by Barr Pharmaceuticals, Ranbaxy Labs and Genpharm. New atypical antipsychotics include Zyprexa by Eli Lilly; Risperdal marketed by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subdivision of Johnson & Johnson; Abilify by Bristol-Myers Squibb; Clozaril sold by Novartis, and Geodon by Pfizer.
Dr Fred Baughman, a recognized authority on psychotropic drugs, says that psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry “married and launched the joint market strategy of calling all emotional and behavioral problems ‘brain diseases’, due to ‘chemical imbalances’, needing ‘chemical balancers.’ He calls the use of the chemical imbalance theory the “biggest health care fraud and mass character assassination" in human history, and says it must be abolished. There is no scientific basis for what is merely a theory, but that doesn’t take away from the need for drug detox and often drug rehab after being exposed to these drugs for any length of time.
What’s worse, many of the drugs are statistically associated with suicidal behavior in children, and parents are not receiving full disclosure of the risks. If your kids or the kids of a friend are being “TeenScreened" and prescribed psychiatric drugs, call a drug rehab program counselor right away to see if drug detox and rehab are needed.
Rod Mactaggart has sinced written about articles on various topics from Addictions, Alcohol Treatment and Keyboard Synthesizer. Rod is a freelance writer that contributes articles on health.. Rod Mactaggart's top article generates over 135000 views. to your Favourites.
