Michael Shearer

And that was, I mean, obviously a trauma for any family.

But compounding it...

was the fact that, you know, his mother was left with 11 children at that point to raise on her own.

And he was left, you know, basically shipped off to boarding school.

I mean, he was left without many people raising him.

And he tells the story of...

The summer after his father is killed, 1969, someone offers him LSD.

He was into a comic book at the time that was about Native Americans who lived among dinosaurs.

So he said to this boy who's offering him acid, you think I'll see dinosaurs?

It just shows, I'm a 15-year-old kid.

Yeah, 15.

And that's just the beginning of his night.

I mean, he crashes pretty hard later on, and another group of kids offer him crystal meth.

And it was the crystal meth—I mean, I think psychedelics have continued to play a role in his life, but it was a crystal meth that led to the heroin.

And he said a year later, you know, at 16, he was taking trips up to New York to buy smack on the street and continued as a regular heroin user—

through several boarding schools as a high school student, through Harvard University, through the University of Virginia, where he got a law degree, through his first legal jobs in New York City until the addiction sort of got the best of him.

He had actually booked a trip to the Midwest where he was hoping to go into rehab.

And on the plane out there, he overdosed in the bathroom of the plane and was pulled off the plane.

They found heroin on him.

He was arrested.