- The pain got to the point where pornography
was a need in my life.
And it was something that I had to have
to be able to to live.
And when I got to that point,
it was like, what's the point in living anymore?
(light heartening music)
My name is Smith Alley.
I'm 18 years old.
I just turned 18 this year.
I'm a senior.
I love to play lacrosse.
I love everything that has an engine in it.
If it has an engine and wheels, I'm in.
Dirt biking, motorcycles, cars, I love it all.
I love to get my hands dirty.
(bike engine revving)
It's definitely a very loud bite.
I like to call myself a wounded healer.
So I've been hurt, and now I like to heal people.
I truly believe that this generation has so much potential,
and a lot of it's being wasted right now.
And so I'm trying to get youth, especially to step out
of their comfort zone to push themselves
to become the person that they want to be,
and ultimately to take care of themselves.
Because a lot of us, youth, aren't right now.
Growing up in school, it was interesting.
I had a stutter when I was little that was really bad.
I remember introducing myself the first day
of the first grade and I had stuttered.
I was like, a-a-a-a-a m-m-m-m-m my name is Smith.
And I sat down and I was super flustered
and angry and embarrassed.
And this girl turns around and looks me straight in the eye.
She was on the red table.
I even remember the colors of the tables.
And she says, "Why can't you talk right?"
And I remember after that first day
of getting made fun of for my stutter,
I decided I'm gonna make fun of myself
so that no one else does.
I was nine years old when I was first exposed
to pornography.
And my parents were the woke parents in the neighborhood.
They had all the conversations, we had the filters,
we had everything like that.
And I remember thinking back on those conversations
and remembering, turn it off and tell an adult.
We've all heard that.
I still thought that my parents would be disappointed
or ashamed of me because of what I'd seen.
And so I didn't tell them about the experience then.
Then about nine months to a year later,
it came back into my life and I started using it for,
I think what a lot of people use it for.
And it was a drug for me.
It was a way that I dealt with all of those small things
that I was feeling.
And it led to the most vicious, self-loathing,
self-hatred cycle that I've ever been in.
A lot of these things earlier in my life,
like being asked why I couldn't talk right,
being the chubby kid,
all of those things just planted a little seed of doubt,
and pornography and social media just fed on that big time.
Ripped me apart, just exposed all of my insecurities.
Everything that was inside got worse because of porn.
It took this kid who didn't think that he deserved love
to a kid who didn't think that there was love for him.
I remember sitting in school,
I was in my shop class and I made a plan to take my life.
It all was based on the fact that I didn't want
my parents to find me.
My parents are such good people
and I didn't want them to have to walk in
and see me dead there.
(Smith sobs)
And so as kid I remember not wanting them
to go through that pain.
And this is why Fight the New Drug
has such a special place in my heart.
I found Fight,
and I can remember being this little kid
and reading this research that they had done
and the Brain, Heart, World and all these things,
and I realized that I'm not a bad person.
For the first time I realized that I'm not a bad kid.
I'm a good kid
who's enslaved by this content that's a drug.
Then in April 23rd, 2018,
I got into my first run in with the law.
And that is what let everything fall apart.
So my parents found out about that.
The police contacted them
and then everything just laid out there.
That same day I'm laying in my bed about to go to sleep,
I remember just wondering what my world was gonna look like,
not knowing if I'd be able
to go to the college that I wanted to
or be able to do all these things
that I thought my life was supposed to,
I thought that's where I was supposed to go.
And my mom came down to me that night
and she just grabbed my face as I was going to bed.
And she said, "Smith, I will fight for you,
but you have to fight for yourself first."
And that was the true pivot point.
And it was that day where I decided
that no matter where I had been
I was going to become this person that I wanted to be.
- So Smith had a run in with the law.
And I had this emotional whirlwind for about an hour,
and then my mind came to clarity of what my,
sorry, of what my son had been dealing
with for several years on his own.
But I grabbed his face.
I wanted him to hear me.
Grabbed his face and I said,
"I will fight for you, Smith,
but you have to fight for yourself.
I can't do this for you."
Little did I know
that that was such a changing moment for him.
He talks about how originally he has thought
that it was fear that helped him make some changes,
but later he realized that it was love.
- I stopped living in fear,
because I had realized
that living in fear had almost destroyed me.
Living in fear had brought me to the point of death, right?
And I couldn't do that anymore.
It just wasn't an option.
I had to be fearless,
and I had to be confident, and I had to fight.
So I have a company called Protecht Strong.
I saw this huge gap today where parents,
my parents grew up not knowing technology,
but they had to parent me who only knew the digital era.
I flipped that script,
and now I help parents set up their tech safely,
know how to monitor it,
know how to use all the software that they have,
and then talk about important conversations
that they should be having with their kids.
These are all the notes that I get it.
I don't know.
It's really hard because you hear
a lot of sad stories doing this,
but at the same time this just makes it worth it,
and it's good motivation.
Yeah, it's cool.
There's a lot of these that mean a lot to me.
The reason that I do what I do,
I really think that it stems back to, at a point in my life,
I really needed some help from other people,
and I got it.
I got to a point where I was happy
in life and I felt so good after recovery,
and after going through all these steps
bettering my mental health.
And I didn't want to keep that to myself.
I felt like that would be selfish.
I think there's a lot of hope out there.
I've always shared my story
not because I like talking about myself.
The only reason I've done that is to hopefully
someone can see themselves,
just a little bit of themselves and a little bit of me.
And I hope that that's a part of hope.
And I hope that the reason why I'm doing this,
I believe the reason why Fight the New Drug
does this is to share stories
so that people can find hope in them.
And that's what I want from this.
I want people to know that they can turn their life around.
I want people to know that they are not their actions,
they are not their thoughts.
That you can become the person that you want to be.
(upbeat music)