Heroin claims the life of star baseball player

Michael Hutts was not a young man prone to trouble.  On the contrary, he was a Dean’s List student at Georgia Tech and a star pitcher on the university’s varsity baseball team.  So when his roommate opened the door to their dorm room and found Hutts dead of a heroin overdose, the pure shock of the incident reverberated across the entire campus community.

In an Atlanta Journal Constitution article last month, Hutts’ coach Danny Hall said, “Never was there even a moment where you thought, ‘Something is going on here. We need to check on this guy. We need to watch him closely.’ That’s what has made this even more shocking.’”.   Hall’s reaction typifies the insidious nature of heroin use in this country.  In the mind of the public, heroin addiction only strikes those from urban areas and the lower-rungs of the socio-economic scale.  But the truth of the matter is anyone – from the schoolteacher down the street to the meg-watt Hollywood A-lister – can be taken down HARD by heroin use.

So how could this happen to a kid who seemingly had everything going for him?  Swap heroin for cocaine and the answer may be found in what has come to be known as the Len Bias Effect - the deadly combination of heroin’s lethal power and the hubris of a young male in the prime of his life who feels that nothing can bring him down.   (Bias was the over first pick in the NBA draft in 1986 who died of a cocaine overdose hours after his selection.)

We hope Michael Hutts did not die in vain, and that the parents of great kids will find the time and talk to them about drugs, even if they’re on the Dean’s List and can throw a 95-mile per hour fastball

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