Just a few days from now, the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire will kick off its fifth and final season. Considered one of the best and most realistic portrayals of crime and corruption in a struggling city (Baltimore, in this case), the show traces the thin line that divides the good guys from the bad. Whether cops stealing stacks of cash during drug busts or thieving dockworkers pooling together money for a stained-glass window at their local church, the distinction between law and lawlessness is often hard to find.

And just as the show's final season will focus on the media's role in covering crime, last Sunday a Post reporter penned an admission of his own -- as a crime reporter during the District's crack epidemic in the late '80s and early '90s, he developed an addiction to the very drug that provoked many of the violent deaths he was tasked with covering.

In the piece (which was unfortunately relegated to the W section of the paper), the reporter, Ruben Castaneda, details his double-life as both a crack addict and a Post Metro correspondent. From his first brush with the drug to an attempt at rehab (pushed by his colleagues at the Post), to relapse and finally to conquering the addiction, the piece is a painful yet riveting description of a man torn between his professional duties and his personal failings. That he survived the ordeal and remains on staff at the Post is testament to good luck and understanding colleagues.

From 1989 to the end of 1991, while I worked the night shift covering the D.C. police and crime beat, I was an active crack addict and alcoholic. My use was not recreational. I was not a dilettante.

To feed my addiction, I routinely ventured into some of the same drug-plagued neighborhoods where I covered nighttime murders and nonfatal shootings -- violence that was usually fueled, directly or otherwise, by the crack trade. I made buys in dark crack houses and dangerous back alleys. I smoked my way to the edge of financial ruin. At the same time, I helped chronicle the bloody toll the drug was exacting on the street.

My first front-page story for The Post appeared in February 1990, when four young men were shot to death and two others were wounded during a gun battle in a small nightclub on the corner of Seventh and S streets NW. A police detective told me the two primary combatants were drug dealers. I was quite familiar with the block; it was one of my favorite locations to cop -- that is, purchase -- crack. As I arrived at the scene of the shooting on a frigid, snowy night, I scanned the area, hoping that none of the street's crack slingers, who would probably recognize me, were around (they weren't -- police had swarmed the corner).