Later Years
Sharkey struggled with an addiction to cocaine and heroin throughout his career. He was involved in four drug-related car wrecks, two requiring microsurgery on his eyes.
On July 30, 1992, while filming a guest spot on the television series, The Hat Squad, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he was arrested for drug possession. Canadian customs officials, making a routine inspection of incoming cargo at the airport, discovered small amounts of cocaine and heroin in a black envelope being sent from Los Angeles, California to Sharkey. Police searched his hotel room and found an additional supply of drugs. He was jailed and later released on bail. Sharkey's role on The Hat Squad was recast.
Sharkey reportedly contracted the AIDS virus through intravenous drug use and was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987. Despite his diagnosis, he remained in denial about his HIV positive status. Sharkey convinced himself he harbored a strain of HIV that would never endanger himself or anyone else. He told no one of his condition, and reportedly did not disclose the fact that he was HIV positive to women with whom he was in intimate relationships.
Read more about this topic: Ray Sharkey
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow,
Came that “Ave atque Vale” of the poet’s hopeless woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago,”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)