Speaks to Montclair State students about athletes' vulnerability to pain killers
Ray Lucas played for eight years in the NFL.
Donny Allieri played four years of high school football.
Ray Lucas has had 19 surgeries and 19 concussions, and has plates and screws in his back, neck and knees.
Donny Allieri had one injury, a torn thumb ligament.
But both ended up in the same place: addicted to prescription pain killers. Then, Donny Allieri got worse. He took the path from painkillers to heroin.
On Thursday morning, Ray Lucas was guest lecturer for a class called "Social Problems in Sports" at Montclair State University. One of the students in the class is his daughter, Rayven, who lived the story her dad was telling.
Donny Allieri was home in Boonton Township, hoping one day to do what Lucas does: Tell his story as a cautionary tale and hope to God someone, even just one someone, listens.
Both of their narratives are typical addict stories. No, check that. They are both typical stories of addiction, because both point out there is no such thing as a typical addict.
"You don't picture a professional athlete being an addict," Lucas, 43, told the class. "You think of an addict as some bum on the street."
Both Lucas and Allieri talk of being in rehab with "Wall Street guys" and, as Allieri said, "guys living under a bridge."
We know all this. We also know that the path from prescribed painkillers to painkiller addiction can be so quick and insidious for some people, that the word killer takes on a more ominous meaning.
MORE: Recent Mark Di Ionno columns
What is new is the vulnerability of high school athletes, especially those in high-contact sports such as football and wrestling, according to University of Michigan research professor Philip Veliz, who has published 13 academic studies on drug use in teens and adolescents.
In one study, he found 11 percent of high school athletes used prescribed pain medication just to get high by the time they were seniors. He is now studying the path from pain meds to heroin.
"We hear about it anecdotally," Veliz said in a phone interview Friday. "But there had never been an academic study to see if it's true."
Even without the definitive heroin link, the rise of painkiller addiction among athletes is alarming.
"These painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin are super-addictive," Veliz said. "They relieve acute pain; they're not for long-term use."
One of the researchers on his team uncovered perhaps the scariest statistic of them all: 75 percent of parents allow their children to manage their own medication.
"They might only need one or two, but they have a prescription for 30, so they take them all. That's why parents really need to monitor what their kids are taking," Veliz said.
"They (doctors) give them out like candy," said Allieri, 23. "That's a fact."
Allieri tore the ligaments in his right thumb during a college-scouting combine at the University of Delaware in 2009. He was 17. A local "pain doctor" prescribed OxyContin, he said, "and never mentioned they were addictive."
He took the pills for four months. When he stopped, he got sick.
"It was like the flu times 10," he said. "Sweating, throwing up. I knew it was withdrawal."
He found them where he could - in friends' medicine cabinets or for sale on the street.
"But they were $25, $30 a pill," he said. "Heroin was much cheaper. You got more for you money."
Within a year, Allieri was shooting heroin and began a journey that included losing a full football scholarship to Villanova, burglary and animal cruelty charges - to which he pled guilty - and seven trips to rehab. He's clean now and trying to find his place in life.
"My story was not unique," he said Friday. "Everybody had the same story."
Lucas' story is as much about the athletes' hard-headed mentality to play at all costs, as it is the muscular potency of the latest generation of painkillers.
Lucas was a three-sport, all-state athlete at Harrison High School, the starting quarterback at Rutgers and for the New York Jets, and a special teams player and back-up quarterback for three other teams.
The first time he got seriously injured at Rutgers - a torn rotator cuff - he took ibuprofen for pain.
A few years later, in the NFL, the hits got harder and the pills got stronger, but neither curtailed Lucas's desire to play.
"Every time you have a collision, it's like being in a car accident," Lucas told the Montclair State class, led by professors Rob Gilbert and John McCarthy. "And for all those little dings ... you start getting drugs."
The little dings worsened into major injuries: two herniated discs while lifting, a serious neck injury, two bad knees, and on and on. Still, he played.
"I would have done anything to stay in the NFL,'' he said.
So the injuries piled up and so did the pills. Roxicodone, Percocet, OxyContin, Oxycodone. At one point, Lucas said he was taking 1,200 to 1,400 pills a month.
The first time he tried to stop, he got what Allieri described as the flu times 10.
"Stuff was coming out of me everywhere," Lucas told the class. "I called the doctor and he said, 'Take 3' (of the pain pills)."
It was official. He was an addict. In his 2014 book, "Under Pressure" (Triumph Books), Lucas tells of how he foraged for pills from doctors and street dealers, and how he came close to killing himself by driving off the George Washington Bridge. He's clean now, but says, "I'm more afraid of those little pills than anything in the world."
A typical story of addiction. And, these days, from a typical source.
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.