I Was A Harvard Student Secretly Addicted To Oxy And Xanax

I Was A Harvard Student Secretly Addicted To Oxy And Xanax

From Rise Above with Kevin Lanning by Kevin Lanning

August 23, 2026 · 1h 14m

About this episode

Emma Gray shares her journey of addiction and recovery, detailing her experiences as a Harvard student struggling with substance abuse.

On paper, Emma Gray had every advantage — a New York City upbringing, elite schools, a spot at Harvard, and eventually a six-year finance career. Underneath it, she was a person who, in her own words, couldn't sit with an uncomfortable feeling for more than a moment without needing to escape it. Emma started with alcohol, which never agreed with her, and then found the thing that did: first weed, then the downers that would take over her life — Oxy and Xanax. She describes the exact mechanism of her addiction with unusual clarity: the second she felt relief from a drug, she was already terrified of losing it and reaching for more. That pattern followed her to Harvard, where she partied instead of studying, plagiarized her way through assignments, looked administrators in the eye and denied it, and was ultimately asked to leave. Her rock bottom came quietly — 72 hours in bed, not answering her phone, her family convinced she was overdosing. She got sober in 2015 after treatment at Caron and an intensive therapy program that, as she puts it, rewired her. The first year was small and hard: sober living, meetings, reality TV, knitting, learning to read a full page of a book again…

People in this episode

Host: Kevin Lanning

Guest: Emma Gray

Topics covered

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard, Caron

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