When did Ray Charles become addicted to heroin?

Question: When did Ray Charles become addicted to heroin?

Answer: Ray became addicted to heroin sometime early in 1946, while working as a backup musician in Jacksonville, Florida. Many believe this was a direct result of the death of Charles' mother, Aretha, a few months earlier: her loss frightened him in a way that blindness and poverty never had, and Ray was at that time working at least partially in the jazz world, the first genre of musicians to widely use the drug. Although he continued to struggle with his addiction for the next two decades, his dependency never seemed to affect his work habits, remarkably. In 1964, Charles was convinced to go "cold turkey" by a drug bust, his third, in Boston. He entered a Los Angeles clinic and came out rehabilitated, his only vice thereafter a mug of coffee laced with gin. Charles has been known to comment that giving up cigarettes was much harder to do.