Drugs

It's unlikely Andrew Gelfand would have guessed pricking his finger on a cactus in a drug induced haze would change his life.

“I was sitting on a couch and I was really high, and I was trying to grab a glass of water and instead kept grabbing a cactus,” Gelfand said.

According to Gelfand, it was then that he realized his life needed a major overhaul.

“It hit me then, if I didn’t do something about this I'd probably be sitting in the same place when I was 50,” Gelfand said.

“I couldn’t deal with that… I wasn’t ready to just sit on a couch and do drugs my whole life.”

Gelfand said he initially started doing drugs when he was 12 because it provided an escape from his problems.

By the time he was 16, he was addicted.

“Everyone has hard times when they’re a teenager, and everyone has their own methods of escaping,” Gelfand said. “That was just the one that I found.”

Gelfand said that one of the things he was trying to escape was what he saw as social isolation.

“I came from a very upper middle class white neighborhood which was not big on the whole diversity thing,” Gelfand said. “And me not being exactly like everybody else, I wasn’t really socially accepted.”

Gelfand attributes learning from the lives of others as the reason for him deciding to turn his life around.

“What helped was that I saw where it was leading the lives of a lot of people I knew,” Gelfand said. “They were in there 30's and 40's and were still doing drugs like they were in high school.”

“It took me a long time, but I realized that wasn’t what I wanted for myself.”