Science of Addiction Holds Promise for Fight

He was 40 years old, a father of three and an Orlando house painter, clean and sober for eight years. One night last summer, he climbed into his truck, stuck a needle in his arm and injected himself with what would be his final dose of heroin.

Reggy Colby, a 30-year-old recovering heroin addict, displays a bag of heroin sold in Camden, N.J., on Aug. 21, 2013. Colby says he got out of jail two days ago, where he was forced to get clean while serving a 30 day sentence. According to Colby, he was in jail for for stealing food after getting hungry. Colby says he grew up in a "Leave it to Beaver" home in Cherry Hill, an afluent city nearby, and originally went to college for architecture before dropping out. After leaving school, he moved to Florida, where he got married and had a daughter, Colby says. He joined the army in 2007, trained as a field artilery specialist and served in Afghanistan in 2009 through 2010, until he was injured in an improvised explosive device, which peppered his body with shrapnel, Colby says. It was while recovering from his injuries that he became addicted to heroin, a drug he had also tried as a teen. Since becoming addicted, he has been dishonorably discharged from the Army, divorced, and estranged from his daughter, and has become homeless in Camden. Andrew Burton/Getty Images

ORLANDO, Fla.—He was 40 years old, a father of three and an Orlando house painter, clean and sober for eight years. One night last summer, he climbed into his truck, stuck a needle in his arm and injected himself with what would be his final dose of heroin.

“The paramedics worked on him for a long time, and when they declared him dead he was still clutching his last bag of the drug in his fist,” says Pastor Spence Pfleiderer. “That’s the power of addiction.”

As president and CEO of the Orlando nonprofit treatment program Central Care Mission, Pfleiderer has served seven years on the front lines of the war on drugs, fighting for those whose often-fragile grip on sobriety pits them against an unrelenting enemy.

I tell my guys, 'One of the easiest things in the world is getting you off drugs. It's staying off that's the hard part.'

— Pastor Spence Pfleiderer, president & CEO, Central Care Mission