He’s a Camosun student now, but eight years ago, at the age of 25, Justin Scott wasn’t, and he was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Suffering from an addiction to methamphetamine and going through spiritual despair, Scott says he decided to go to his parents and isolate himself from his fellow drug users.
Today, the Open the Doors contest (part of a campaign to lower tuition costs and make education more accessible in BC) gives students a chance to tell their post-secondary stories. Scott used his experiences to enter in the contest and came out a winner.
For his contest entry, Scott wrote in his essay—which won him the third-place $1,000 prize—that the itch to use and abuse drugs was still there, but that he’s currently winning the battle with addiction, having been clean since 2008. Scott says post-secondary was a key factor in his recovery.
“I was a meth user for ten years,” says Scott. “I pretty much just locked myself away from everybody I knew for a long time.”
Many success stories include treatment, meetings, and therapy; Scott says that wasn’t the path he chose.
“After 10 years of just losing everything in my life, I decided to quit and was able to just stop,” he says. “I had a business and cars and a house. I really lost everything.”
After the detoxification process, Scott yearned for a sense of meaning and inertia that he says drugs robbed him of.
“Post-secondary education was really what saved my life after getting clean,” he says. “I didn’t have education, or a job to go to, so I really had to work myself up to getting to post-secondary education. Having money to be stable with, actually having something to go to every day and do… keeping myself busy was probably the saving factor that kept me off of drugs.”
Scott graduated from the Health Care Assistant program at Camosun in 2011. But five years later, he realized a change of pace was needed; he’s now back at Camosun, in his second year of Electrical Engineering.
“It was quite the journey to reset my life and get into school, because I didn’t have any support,” he says. “I couldn’t get a student loan because I had no financial history. So I got a real job and was able to prove I was worthy of a loan.”
Camosun College Faculty Association (CCFA) president Al Morrison says that the CCFA was one of many BC faculty associations supporting the Open the Doors campaign. Morrison says that opening the doors to education, much like the name of the campaign suggests, is vital.
“All colleges are coming together, basically wanting to share a message with the politicians, be it the current party in power, or whatever; we just want to make awareness of the challenges that students are facing in post-secondary going toward the May election,” says Morrison. “We thought we would do that through a campaign where students shared their stories.”