Steered Straight founder’s personal stories reasonate with BVHS, BVMS students

Michael DeLeon told Brandon Valley High School and Middle School students that life comes down to two things: Your choices and your decisions.

And he ought to know.

DeLeon didn’t make the wisest choices and decisions in his life from his pre-teen years and on.

“I know a lot about choices and decisions because I’ve been on both sides,” says the Nashville, Tenn.-based DeLeon, and founder of Scared Straight. “I’m traveling the country talking about the biggest pandemic our country has ever seen, and I ain’t talking about COVID.”

The pandemic DeLeon talked to BV students about are the lives being lost in this country to drugs and alcohol. More than COVID will ever take, he adds.

“We are in a crisis of epic proportions and your generation is unfortunately being lied to, straight up being lied to. The media, the tobacco industry, the marijuana industry, the vaping industry – they are laser focused on profits and their profits are determined how well they can fool you, lie to you, get you addicted.”

The filmmaker/editor wasn’t always so successful. To be blunt, he spent 12 years behind bars for dealing drugs.

“Never in the history of our country has an entire generation been so systemically lied to about so many things,” he said, citing vaping and marijuana legalization. “… Every single day in almost every single school I go to, I have students come up to me at the end and they give me their vape. They realize, wait a minute, this really is bad.”

But there are two reasons kids don’t give them up.

“No. 1, you’re scared. You think you’re going to get into trouble. You give it to me, there is no trouble. There are no consequences. They don’t know who gave me vapes. You come up and put it in my hand, and I’ll get rid of it for you,” he assured the students. “The only other reason that kids won’t give it up is addiction. And when it comes to addiction, I’m the expert. When it comes to quitting an addictive substance, I’m the expert.”

Following both assemblies at the high school on Monday morning, DeLeon had four vapes in his hand. And they came from BVHS students.

He shared the same message about the dangers of alcohol, nicotine and marijuana that afternoon at Brandon Valley Middle School. 

DeLeon told the kids that vape shops in every state across the U.S. are selling poison.

“And you guys are sticking it in your mouth like it’s no big deal,” he said, noting the No. 1 cause of death in the country age 27 and below is drugs and alcohol. 

“Your generation is being devastated. I’ve been to 278 funerals,” he said.

There have been 208 cases that DeLeon has had associations with across America since August – the start of the current school year – where a child had died in their school building from fentanyl in a pill, a powder or a vape.

“I don’t do this because I know a lot about it, I make movies about it. I don’t do this because I went to college for it. I have six college degrees. Big deal. That just means I have a ton of student loans. I do this because I lived it, I lived it,” he told the kids.

 Following DeLeon’s talk, a BVHS student - now four months sober - told DeLeon that his story really hit home.

“About a year or two ago, I started smoking because of my depression and anxiety, so I started self-medicating. Just as he said, you start off thinking, hey, nothing’s going to happen, and I’m just going to smoke or whatever. A year later I was looking into harder things and eventually got hooked on Oxy (Oxycodone). Like he was saying, you start out with something like nicotine and think it’s easy, and then not too much longer you’re on Opioids, looking for anything you can,” the student shared

The young man considers himself a miracle for the simple fact that he’s alive.

“With how bad the fentanyl lacing is lately,” he says. “We’re getting everything switched around and we’re figuring it out.”

DeLeon, who was born in Ireland and moved to the U.S. with his family at age 5, grew up dirt poor. His parents divorced when he was in the fifth grade, and until that time, he had perfect attendance at school and was a straight A student. The reason he didn’t miss a day of school: Breakfast and lunch.

“My parents put one meal on the table, not because they were mean, but because that’s all they could afford,” he tells.

His school principal often referred to him as “the happiest little kid in the world.” 

But the fifth grade is when it all changed for him. A broken family and uncles that physically abused him in an attempt “to make a man out of me.”

The smile on his face, DeLeon says, was to keep others from knowing his pain.

“I never knew what that expression, ‘Hurt people hurt other people,’” he said. “All I had to do was ask for help.”

He could’ve talked with a guidance counselor, his teacher, a pastor or even his mother. But he didn’t.

Instead, his unruly behavior led to multiple suspensions from school and eventually to counseling, where “the trusted adult molested him in his sixth, seventh and eighth grade” years.

It was then that he first crossed paths with Jimmy, the coolest kid in the neighborhood. Jimmy first introduced him to cigarettes, later invited him to a party, where he drank alcohol for the first time and then next began smoking marijuana. And he was only 11 years old.

By age 12 he was taking pills, and a year later, he was addicted to pills.

“For my 14th birthday, somebody put two white lines on a little mirror and told me to put a dollar bill up my nose and snort them,” he said. 

By age 16 he was shooting cocaine into his veins, and ny age 17, he switched to heroin.

“Two days before my 19th birthday, I found meth, so I shot heroine and meth for the next 10 years while I destroyed my life,” he tells. 

Eventually, he went to prison, where he lived behind bars for the12 years.

He’s also battled cancer – twice – and says the cause was drugs.

“If you don’t walk away with anything except for one statement, vaping causes cancer. You think cancer is bad now … Your health is important. It’s paramount. Your future is not college and beyond. Your future is right here and right now. The choices and the decisions you make right now is going to affect your life today, this week. The choices and decisions that you make in your life will affect you for the rest of your life. And it’s not just you, it’s the rest of your family,” he said.

DeLeon told how he ruined his wife’s life and didn’t see his daughter and son for the 12 years he was behind bars.

“But it was my mother that I affected the most. I got so big and bad into my addiction that I ended up getting involved in a criminal enterprise. I was in a gang in Newark, N.J., and I opened up my house to drug distribution. I had two kids in my living room cutting up drugs on a coffee table one day, and my 5-year-old daughter Kayla walks into the living room and she picks this kid’s 9mm Ruger up off the coffee table, and she’s playing with this loaded gun like it’s a toy. If the gun was cocked a half-inch more to the left, I wouldn’t have a daughter. When she pulled the trigger, the bullet went through her cheek, her earlobe and smashed into the window in the kitchen, and my wife freaked out. She came home after the hospital and packed up her clothes, packed up the kids’ clothes and left me.” 

The note on dining room table that she left read, ‘I love you and I know you’ll choose me over your drugs.’

That would’ve been a good idea, but DeLeon didn’t make that choice.

Instead, he became homeless and at 28 years old, moved in with his mother. He was still dealing drugs, running guns and shooting meth and heroin into his arms every day.

It was a large-scale drug deal that he had organized, and it went horribly wrong. He brought two kids with him and they both got shot.

“One of the kids that got shot, he died. He was Big Homey’s little brother, the leader of our gang, and I got his brother killed in a drug deal that went bad, so he put a hit out on me. ‘Bring him to me, I’m going to put a bullet in his head.’ And he meant it,” DeLeon tells.

“Big Homey” tasked two others to find him. While he was off on a drug binge, they went to his mother's home, and when they didn’t find him there, they murdered his mother. 

“On Sunday, May 14, 1995, I came home to find my 63-year-old mother strangled and murdered in her bedroom. Sunday, May 15, 1995 happened to be Mother’s Day morning. They murdered my mom on Mother’s Day morning. Just imagine that for a moment. I’m the guy that got his mother murdered on Mother’s Day morning,” he said. “When that kid gave me that cigarette, I didn’t know where it was going to take me. When that kid gave me that alcohol, I didn’t know how it was going to affect my life. When that kid gave me that joint, I didn’t know who else’s life it was going to affect. But no one thinks it’s going to happen to them,” he said. “It breaks my heart that some kids leave the assembly and emotionally detach so much – ‘That’s not going to happen to me. It’s OK, I’m just vaping. I know I’m vaping weed, but that’s not going to happen.’ I’m not saying if you vape that you’re going to turn into a heroin addict. I’m not saying if you’re smoking weed and drinking that you’re going to turn into a meth addict. That’s my story. I don’t know what your story is going to be. Problem is, this wasn’t supposed to be my story. But it became my story because of the choices and decisions that I made.”

BVHS Principal Mark Schlekeway is hopeful that DeLeon’s story gets students thinking about the dangers of choices and decisions that the Steered Straight founder made. He said it was important to not only educate the kids, but the community, too. 

“The vape world has really evolved and I believe knowledge is power, and our community was needing some knowledge. Our partnership with the Brandon Community Foundation, them bringing this group in from a financial standpoint was a win-win, because we hope to educate our students, our staff, and then in turn hopefully educate our parents and guardians, which will hopefully lead to conversations at home around the table,” he said.

He described the near 90-minute assemblies as “powerful and impactful.”

“Sometimes, we don’t know what we don’t know. The issue with vapes and Juuls and things like that is they are concealed, easy to use in what I would say, closed areas like restrooms. I just think educating our students, educating our community are ways that we can be proactive on an issue that’s an issue across the country,” Schlekeway said. “Anytime that you can bring someone in that has lived the world and can show their experience for the better good of others, that’s always going to be powerful and impactful.”

As he wrapped up his presentation, DeLeon reminded the students that 90 percent of drug addiction begins as a teenager, “and it starts with three things: alcohol, nicotine and marijuana. … Scared Straight doesn’t work – Steered Straight works, and if you have the truth then your choices and your decisions are informed ones. This is the most important time of your life, freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. You are laying the foundation for the rest of your life, and some of you are taking risks with everything. Vaping is going to become – mark my words – the number one cause of death for your generation – respiratory disorders, cancer, and heavy metal poisoning.”

To learn more about DeLeon’s path to founding Steered Straight and information on the dangers of alcohol, nicotine, vaping and drugs, visit steeredstraight.org. A video is also being shared with Brandon Valley parents and may be viewed on the Lynx TV YouTube channel as well.