Unlike a good number of his peers, Jon Bon Jovi had very limited experience with drugs. He pulled out of the drug scene at a young age when he found it taking up too much of his mental space, and he later told the Daily Mirror, “I was never attracted to [drugs].” So he was shocked to hear about his daughter Stephanie’s drug overdose; it was completely out of their home life experience.
Stephanie, who was living in a dormitory at Hamilton College at the time of her overdose, was found unresponsive when police and paramedics responded to a 911 call. Besides the heroin she had taken, drug paraphernalia and marijuana were found in the dorm. Another student, Ian Grant, was arrested in connection with the incident, and Stephanie was charged with “criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree, criminal possession of marijuana in the fourth degree, [and] criminally using drug paraphernalia” per a police press statement (via NBC News).
Bon Jovi was sympathetic to his daughter and her peers after the overdose. “There’s many more pressures on kids,” he said to the Mirror. “‘What is this college degree going to do for me, what am I going to be when I grow up, will I be able to accomplish things?'” He felt that such pressures put his daughter’s generation’s world leagues apart from his. “I feel it was a terrible tragic lesson of life … I know personally people whose sons and daughters, where it was a lot, lot worse. That could have been Stephanie.”
