WATCH: Teen's Drug Overdose in Classroom Spurs Video Plea

In 17 years, he’s never seen that look on the faces of his parents.

It was a look of dismay, sadness, confusion.

They stood over him in the emergency room waiting for him, their oldest son, to recover from a drug overdose he suffered earlier in the morning.

Peter Marley went to school on Tuesday at West Morris Central under the influence of drugs. The high school senior certainly didn’t expect to end his morning in the emergency room after swallowing a chemically-extracted drug before classes began.

But he’s turning his poor decision and life-changing experience into a message for others, one that he hopes will save someone from going over the edge.

Just one day after being discharged from the hospital, Marley sat in his bedroom in front of a webcam and recorded a six-minute video (see below) explaining what happened and, more importantly, why it shouldn’t happen to anyone else.

Marley explains in detail how he blacked out during his engineering class just before 10 a.m. Two hours earlier he had taken a pill containing DXM, or dextromethorpan, which is found in cough syrup. When isolated, DXM acts as a hallucinogen.

Marley explains in the video how he awoke in his teacher’s office, surrounded by nurses and administrators while emergency medical responders were headed to the school. Marley lost consciousness a number of times before ultimately winding up in the emergency room with his parents.

But the Long Valley teen didn’t make the decision randomly to get high Tuesday. There was a trail that led him there, an escalation over the past year that resulted in a day he’ll never forget.

“It started with cigarettes,” Marley told Patch by phone on Thursday. “Then that went to vaporizing and using (vaporizing) pens. Then I started smoking pot regularly, as much as three times a day.”

At this point the summer of 2014 had begun, and Marley’s parents realized their son had a problem.

“My parents put me in counseling and I stopped smoking pot,” he said. “But the therapy itself wasn’t really working.”

That’s when Marley learned how to chemically alter the foundation of everyday cough syrup, extracting DXM and ingesting it in pill form. Marley was aware that drinking too much of the cough syrup with all its ingredients could lead to drug overdose on its own.

The teen says he was going through a bottle of Delsum each day as he began using DXM exclusively over the summer. The effects were hard to notice by others; no smell, no paraphernalia.

“It puts you in a different world,” Marley said of the high he’d get from DXM. “But you could still function on it. I could go to work, go to school and be fine.”

The reason he decided to go public with his story, however, is explained succinctly in his video message.

“At the time, when I took that pill, I thought I could handle a little more,” he says to the camera. “This video is for anyone who thinks they can handle that one more drink, that one more pill, can stay out that extra hour, have that extra person in their car, take that extra smoke. You can’t.

“For me, it took 16 people to save my life. And I traumatized every single one of them. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”

Marley takes full responsibility for what took place on Tuesday. In fact, he believes his high school has a terrific program to help students who are struggling with substance abuse.

“We have a ton of resources available at the school,” said Cathleen Cartier, West Morris Central High School’s Student Assistance Counselor and certified substance abuse program coordinator. Cartier could not speak about Marley’s incident per school policy, but said she hopes any positive message to come from this will help students see that help is available.

“I hope we can break that code of silence, uncover what a student may believe is a dirty little secret,” Cartier said. “A proactive intervention could help stop someone before it gets to this level.”

Cartier also said she serves as a community resource for parents, not just students, and she is available to anyone in the school community.

The video, Marley says, is a contract that he wants to pass along to anyone else willing to do the same. He’s asking his peers to publically promise to not use any dangerous or illegal substances, declaring his overdose the end of the road for his drug abuse.

“The nurses and social workers at the hospital told me I didn’t die from the (overdose) and was here for a reason,” he said. “So that’s why I made this video.”

Photo and video courtesy Peter Marley.

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