Former NBA big man Willie Cauley-Stein — who recently participated in The Basketball Tournament (TBT) — revealed that without his knowledge, he took fake pills laced with the powerful synthetic opioid drug fentanyl for years. Fentanyl is supposedly 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
“I could easily be dead,” Cauley-Stein said. “So that joy you saw from me in the TBT is different because I know the bullet I really dodged. I asked for help before it was too late, and I got better, but the basketball thing has been a lot harder to get back. So when they asked me to do this, it was too perfect. It just replicated those old times, just exactly how it was. Boom, I got showered with all this love that I needed, absolutely needed and played the best basketball I’ve played in years. That s— was dope.”
In 2021, Cauley-Stein checked himself into an inpatient rehabilitation center for substance abuse. He was under the impression that the drug he had been taking was “bootleg Percocet,” a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen. In reality, he had been consuming fake pills laced with fentanyl.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, around 70 percent of the fentanyl-laced fake pills that the agency seized in 2023 contained a potentially lethal dose of the drug.
Cauley-Stein suggested that he didn’t realize the true danger he had put himself in until he checked himself into the rehab center.
“I didn’t know until I turned myself in,” he said. “I looked at my wife and said, ‘Oh, my God’ because I hear stories all the time about kids going to a party, never taking a drug before, deciding to pop a Percocet, and it ends up being fentanyl, and they die. From one pill. Dude, I was taking hundreds of them, for months and years. It could’ve so easily been me.”
Additionally, the former University of Kentucky standout said that someone he connected with during his time in rehab died of an overdose shortly after a 75-day stay.
“You could kind of tell the way he was walking around that he wasn’t ready to leave yet, that he still wanted to do it,” he said. “Not me. There’s nothing you could ever tell me to get me to do that again. I want no part of it.”
Not long before Cauley-Stein began his 65-day stay in rehab, he stepped away from the Dallas Mavericks in November 2021. The Mavericks cited “personal reasons” for his absence. Cauley-Stein never ended up playing again for the team, as the Mavericks opted to waive him in January of 2022. Almost nobody was aware of his rehab stint at the time.
Cauley-Stein’s downward spiral to substance abuse seemingly started in the summer of 2019. That summer, he agreed to a contract with the Golden State Warriors that didn’t pay him much by NBA standards. He wasn’t home that August when three of his friends were shot and one was killed while they slept at the home Cauley-Stein leased in Sacramento.
“That kind of started a spiral of mental health,” he said. “Trying to deal with that and hoop at the same time — for a new team, on a bad deal, and then my wife got pregnant — it was just too many weird things and big changes, and I got on the pain pills trying to just run away from reality.”
Cauley-Stein’s grandmother was then diagnosed with bone cancer, and he couldn’t handle watching it ravage her.
“I was doing so many pills, I was asleep all the time, or when I was awake, I wasn’t really there,” he said. “I didn’t handle that the right way. I missed really getting to say goodbye to my grandmother. I could’ve been around her more, FaceTimed her more, done so many things just to be with her at the end, and I did the exact opposite. I was a coward, man. Every time I talked to her, she looked different, looked worse, and I didn’t want to see her like that.”
Cauley-Stein’s grandmother died on Dec. 1, 2021. He checked into rehab six days later. The former NBA center has now been sober for the past couple of years.
While it’s tragic that Cauley-Stein seemingly had to deal with substance abuse for a lengthy amount of time, it’s encouraging that he is now far removed from those days and has learned from his past tribulations. It would be nothing short of poetic if he were to make a return to the NBA.
