My Story
Physician. Felon. In long-term recovery. Every one of those is true.
I've told parts of this story on podcasts and in op-eds. This is the first time I've put it all in one place, in order, without softening the hardest parts. If you found this page after searching my name and reading a 2016 news story, you're in the right place. That story is here too, told as plainly as the record.
Before
I graduated from medical school in June 2000 and spent the next two years working in finance in Lower Manhattan. On September 11, 2001, I was at the World Trade Center. I was back at work within weeks. No one, including me, treated what happened as trauma. There was no diagnosis, no leave, and no real conversation about it.
In 2002 I returned to medicine, training in internal medicine and anesthesiology at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia. During residency I started using drugs, mostly cocaine. It made me feel better, and it dulled the trauma and depression I had never dealt with. Over time it became the only way I knew to manage them.
For more than a decade I led two lives. At work I was a physician caring for patients. Outside work I was managing untreated PTSD and depression with drugs, in ways that got harder to hide and harder to stop. Medicine had no room for a doctor who was struggling, and I never told anyone. I watched colleagues treat patients with addiction with judgment and scorn, as if they were lesser people. I said nothing, because speaking up meant admitting I was one of them.
2015 and 2016
In May 2015, I got into recovery. A year later I was accepted into the Caron Treatment Centers Addiction Medicine Fellowship.
One month into the fellowship, I was arrested in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. I posted bail and was home within a few hours. Some of the coverage described me as withdrawing in a jail cell. I wasn't. I had been sober for fourteen months.
The coverage also focused on delivery charges, which were later withdrawn. I was convicted of acquisition of a controlled substance by misrepresentation, for conduct during my active addiction. I was sentenced to five years of probation, which the court terminated early, and I lost my medical license.
I'm accountable for what I was convicted of. The rest belongs on the record too.
After
Rebuilding meant living with the conviction and without a license, completing probation, and slowly becoming someone people could trust again, starting with myself.
The first real opening came from an unlikely place. A Pennsylvania harm reduction coalition hired me to work with the Pennsylvania Sheriffs' Association, training officers on substance use and the public health strategies that save lives. When the coalition dissolved, I co-founded Elevyst to continue the work.
2024
Eight years after my arrest, I was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I'm Canadian by birth, and the conviction made me deportable. I spent two months in detention, not knowing if I would ever go home to my children in Philadelphia. Three law enforcement professionals I'd worked with over the years submitted affidavits and came to my hearing ready to testify. One of them had helped investigate my case in 2016. When the time came, the government's attorney said their testimony wouldn't be necessary. The judge granted cancellation of removal, and my green card was restored.
Now
Today I lead Elevyst, working with health systems, EMS, law enforcement, courts, government agencies, and academic institutions on how to better respond to substance use and mental health crises. I've trained more than 3,000 professionals in 14 states, and I write about addiction and drug policy for STAT, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Nation, among others.
The question that drives the work is the one my own story raised. I spent years surrounded by doctors who never said a word, and I was arrested after I had already gotten better. Why do our systems have so little room for people who are struggling, or for people who are already recovering? I spend my working life helping those same systems make that room.
If your team is ready to respond to substance use differently, let's talk.