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Ric Johnson by Nelson Gary I was fortunate to have known Ric Johnson for several years. He was in chronic pain that was often acute. He never complained to me about it once. I respected him then and always will for his strength in not allowing himself to descend to the nauseating abyss of self-pity. He was a drug addict. He struggled with heroin and pharmaceutical opiates as well as cocaine, principally. He was bipolar, but did not know about it until recently. As so many of us, he self-medicated. After years of struggling, Ric had maintained a period of time off opiates, cocaine, and alcohol, but he started to take inordinate amounts of steroids which preliminary toxicology reports point to contributing to his death as a result of cardiac arrest. Some of this stuff I guess you have to say in these sorts of things. Now I am going to say what I want about Ric, not that I didn't want to say that he was funny and had strength of character in the face of his physical agony, but the other stuff above, well whatever. But who wants to say that someone that you really cared about suffered from drug addiction, a chemical imbalance and died before he was on the wrong side of forty with so much left to offer life and so much to receive from it? I don't know any idiots who work for Heroin Times. When Ric saw a person, he made them feel like they were the sun at the center of the galaxy even if that person had nothing to offer him or anyone else and was standing alone crying her or his eyes out without a friend in the world in a vacant parking lot in a rundown neighborhood in the middle of nowhere with no more hope than finding a cardboard box to sleep in until the miracle happened that was meeting Ric who would help them and give them more than a cardboard box. Ric was...»»

O B I T U A R Y

	March 2003