If the troubles of Michael Szot tell us anything, it is that the power of the lecture is unreliable when it comes to drug and alcohol abuse.

Szot, of Geneva, was both lectured and lecturer. Spared from prison by the grace of others and the mercy of a DuPage County judge after a fatal drunk-driving crash, he periodically left his work-release program to speak with young people about the deceptive allure of drugs.

“Before he died,” Kane County Circuit Judge Clint Hull told our Susan Sarkauskas, “he did a lot of good.”

Unfortunately, it turns out he was doing that good while also succumbing to the very temptations he warned high school students against. Some may be inclined to see hypocrisy or insincerity in that fact. Instead, we see foreboding or menace. It’s easy to lecture about hypocrisy. As Szot’s story demonstrates, it’s also easy to lecture about foreboding and menace. Much easier to lecture than to persuade or even to live the message yourself. Still, the example of the Geneva High School grad’s life must be remembered, as much in the way he died, perhaps more so, as in the way he failed his second chance.

Back in March, we urged Szot, 23, not to squander the gracious opportunity he’d been given when the families of friends who died when he was driving drunk in 2014 urged leniency, and a DuPage County judge sentenced him to four years of probation, a year of work release jail time and 200 hours of community service.

On Tuesday, Sarkauskas reported that even as he was warning Geneva High School students last May about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse, he was himself recovering from a Vicodin overdose two days earlier.

Among many poignant thoughts Szot shared with the Geneva students were the shame and guilt he felt about the poor decisions he had made and the unimaginably horrible turns life can take in an instant of bad judgment.

“You don’t get credit for all the good decisions you made,” he told them. “One careless decision can undo everything you have worked for. Just one night can do that.”

What his tragic end by a drug overdose barely a month later also shows is that, when drugs and alcohol are involved, one night’s bad decision can turn into many.

“You can be in the middle of a decision that you don’t think is that big. And doing it a second time was a lot easier,” he said.

The families of Sajad Syed and Mihirtej Boddupalli, the Szot friends who drowned when he drove into a quarry, insisted at his sentencing that “prison is not the solution” for him. They wanted him to have a chance, in the words of Boddupalli’s brother Dhruv, “to complete his education and use the skills he learns to help others.”

Sadly, he did not get much time for that. That fact remains as powerful a testament to the evils he spoke against as any lecture. We pray that young people contemplating his example will dwell a while on the full, foreboding, menacing, tragic story.