Hands Off and Hopeful
Videographer: Perry Elyaderani; Interviewer: Francesca Collins, Jack Pasi; Editor: Jackie Pascale
Taking students out of their hometowns and grouping them together at Elon, you’d think everyone is pretty similar. Privileged enough to attend a private university, hardworking enough to get into Elon, and a bunch of students from “Outside of…” However, their hometowns and family life are what makes people unique.
Take John Martin, for example. He’s an Elon senior from outside of Philadelphia, PA. He’s from an area of mixed socioeconomic classes, ranging from very low to the highest of highs. Living outside a major city and surrounded by students with a lot of money, Martin says he was introduced to a dangerous drug scene.
Going to clubs and concerts in the city was a weekend pastime for his peers. “They’re at the venue, they buy drugs outside the venue, they roll their faces off, make very poor decisions,” says Martin. “They’ll do that more than one night in a weekend. Then, come back to school on Monday, you know, 16 and 17 year olds. They’d just brag about it.”
Martin says he’s seen several tragedies in his high school over the past few years. One person he knew from having several classes together overdosed on opiates during Martin’s freshman year at Elon. And while the person’s friend group remembered him and threw parties in his memory, one of those friends also overdosed the following year.
To this day, Martin says the two people’s Facebook pages are still active, and seeing their pictures together is haunting. “In rare photos, it would be more people in them that were dead than alive,” Martin says. “To be 21 and thinking about that…it’s a lot.”
Another experience that weighs heavily on Martin is his own dad’s drug abuse. He says he never realized how serious it was when he was younger. “I didn’t understand it growing up,” recalls Martin. “For a long time, they said that he was dependent on sleeping pills and he had to go to rehab for that. Classic, you know?”
Martin’s dad is a doctor and, in his battle with opiate addiction, was constantly surrounded by temptation and drugs. Martin says, “Once he became a doctor, and he really became acclimated with that environment, he started to understand how he could use that environment to feed his addictions.”
Since then, Martin’s dad has come clean about all of his drug use, and still goes to Narcotics Anonymous meetings to this day. Martin says his father has always reminded him about his family being “an addictive bunch.”
“You know, addiction is genetic to a certain degree, and he’s been very vocal about that for most of my life. So that’s why I’ve ever touched opiates, and I never plan to.”
So, even though friends and family coping with addiction have surrounded him his whole life, Martin says it has pushed him even further away from those dangerous habits. Opiates are staring him in the face even today on Elon’s campus, he says.
“If I walked out my front door right now, and I took an hour lap around most of off-campus and came back, I’d probably come back $300-400 poorer with frankly enough substances to incarcerate me for at least a couple lifetimes worth of sentencing.” Martin clarifies that’s not something he’d do, but being clear he “just could.”
Martin acknowledges his own addictive tendencies, but steers clear of drugs because he’s seen first-hand the effects. “When a person becomes an addict, but particularly an opiate addict,” he says, “their priorities can change to a point where they’re an entirely different person. Opiates are probably the only family of drugs that can overcome something like maternal instinct.”
Coming to Elon, Martin knew from his past experiences around opiates that he never wanted to touch them. So even with the party culture and easy access to the drug market, Martin says he’s hopeful that he’ll stay on his clean path.
