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 The 31-year-old Toms River resident — who is recovering from heroin addiction and has been clean for six years — is still heading the financial services firm he founded in 2016 while enrolled in Drug Court, the legal process available to non-violent offenders that’s an alternative to standard prosecution and jail time.

After reaching a low point following his 2014 arrest, when he was resigned to dying of an overdose, last month Feit moved his business, High Power Capital Group, into a larger space at the Commons in Toms River, with plans to add two more employees to the four he already has, and to expand his list of clients, who now include a longtime friend and fellow recovering drug user who had helped guide Feit on his road to recovery.

He has also long shed the fantasy he once briefly harbored before formally entering Drug Court that he would tough out the rigorous 2-year program and then return to drugs, this time a wiser, more successful drug user in control of his habit.

“I laugh at it now because of how blessed I am,” Heit said, referring to his darkest period seven years ago before entering drug court, when he was sleeping on the couch of someone he’d met at the voluntary Florida rehab clinic he had just quit, still injecting heroin and expecting to die.

“I was trapped in a self-inflicted prison, in the grips of active addiction,” he said of that time, when he was 24. “I never thought I’d amount to anything. I thought I was hopeless, useless, and I truly kind of gave up on myself. I said look, I have nothing to offer this world, I might as well just use (heroin) until I’m numb to the reality that my life sucks.”

But slowly, painfully, things did start to get better.

He had already signed up for Drug Court to avoid standard prosecution on a charge of possession with intent to distribute heroin, which stemmed from a 2014 bust in a Wawa parking lot in Jackson, where he’d driven his 2001 BMW X5 drug mobile to sell a $100 “bundle” of the brown powder to a regular customer who, it turned out, arranged the deal as part of a sting operation.

Knowing he was wearing out his welcome on the Florida couch, and terrified of actually being out on the street 1,000 miles from his parents’ house in Manalapan, he called them begging for a plane ticket home. They were all too aware of his drug use. His father, a doctor with a pain management practice, had booked him into the Florida clinic after failed treatment plans in New Jersey. He then managed to stay clean up until his “recovery date” of Feb. 20, 2015, when he passed the first of countless urine tests under the Drug Court program, allowing him to avoid incarceration.

“I just white-knuckled it, because I knew if I showed up dirty I was going to go to jail. And I simply did not want to go to jail. That was the fear that kept me clean before I learned about recovery. I had no idea what recovery was. I didn’t think it was real,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose my freedom, and I thought that if I got through several years of this, I would be able to use successfully again.”

Just over 21,000 adult men and women have been in and out of Drug Court in New Jersey since it was first offered in 2002, according to figures from the state Administrative Office of the Courts. Two-thirds of enrollees don’t finish the program, typically by failing drug tests, and ending up behind bars.

Matthew Feit seen outside of the new Toms River office of the finical firm he launched while still enrolled in Drug Court, High Power Capital Group.Noah K. Murray for | NJ Advance

It demands complete abstinence from drugs and adherence to a rigorous schedule of court appearances, meetings and, of course, drug testing, all closely monitored, with progressively more severe penalties for transgressions, including brief incarcerations, expulsion from the program and entry into the regular criminal justice system.

But among the 6,798 Drug Court graduates of the Drug Court Programs in each of New Jersey’s 21 counties, life often turns around.

Just 15.7% of graduates are re-arrested within three years, compared to 51.4% for non-Drug Court defendants, according to the AOC. By the time they finish the program, graduates have acquired employment, life skills, counseling, support groups and mentors, all to help them stay off of drugs and integrated into society. Among the graduates, 1,785 have had their criminal records expunged.

Drug Court also seems to be a good investment for the state, at least relative to the cost of incarceration. With 5,934 current active participants and an annual cost of $64 million, according to AOC figures, the per capita cost of Drug Court is $10,785, compared to $40,000 a year per prison inmate in 2018.

Or buy here : Penguin My drug of choice is white powder poster

Penguin My drug of choice is white powder poster

Feit has an associate’s degree in business administration from Brookdale Community College, and worked for a couple of years prior to his arrest for a financial brokerage firm. And it was during Phase II of the Drug Court program, in November of 2016, that Feit launched High Power Capital, which connects high-risk businesses in need of operating capital with groups of lenders.

Feit grew up in Manalapan, graduated from Freehold Township High School in the Class of 2009.

“Of course” he drank and smoked pot, he said. But his drug of choice was heroin, which he started using in his late teens, snorting it at first, before switching to intravenous injections in his early 20s

 

 

 

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