Recovering Oxy Addict Wins World Series of Poker

Greg Merson, a 24-year-old from Washington, has plenty to celebrate. He's just won $8.53 million at the World Series of Poker in Vegas—and he's one year clean and sober after battling addictions to oxycontin, adderall, and cocaine. If that weren't the case, he says, “I could possibly not be alive right now, and that’s no exaggeration. I never want to do any of that ever, literally ever.” Merson was a straight-A student in high school, but began smoking marijuana excessively after he graduated—and started playing poker in order to fund that habit. By the second semester of his freshman year of college at Maryland, he was “a full-blown cokehead;” he went on to get hooked on Adderall and OxyContin. He ended up dropping out of school to go to rehab and get clean. It was then that he began playing poker professionally. “I knew I just had to follow my dreams," he says, admitting some friends and family members had difficulty accepting his decision at first. He now credits the game that he first played for drug money with helping to keep him clean: “I don't know where I'd be, if I'd even be alive, if I didn't have this passion.” Merson took the World Series title just before dawn yesterday, after beating eight other finalists in a 12-hour no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament.