Drug Court

When you hold your newborn for the first time, you have dreams and hopes for their future.  Being arrested for heroin posession was not on my list of hopes for my son.  Unfortunately, he has the disease of addiction.  I have come to see this as a disease but it still doesn't make it any easier to watch him walk this path of self destruction.   I love him unconditionally and always will, but he is an adult now and must start acting like one.

Drug court is a program here for first offenders with the goal of complete sobriety over an extended period of time.  The court believes that they deserve a chance to recover from addiction and rewards their hard work at completion of the program by dropping all the charges.  They expect some stumbles along the way and those are met with immediate consequences such as jail time, but they can return to the program and restart that section and move forward.  For me, this will mean I no longer have to be the enforcer of the rules, the court will take care of that.  I never was good at tough love.  The program takes one to two years to complete depending upon setbacks.

Today we watched one young man "graduate" and the judge dropped all the charges and told him how proud she was at his accomplishment.  We saw another young lady choose to not accept the plea deal and return to the regular court system.  For her the judge told her that in her experience, things only got harder in the regular court and that the door was always open should she change her mind.  Another women was rejected by the program due to a prior distribution conviction although the DA and Defense attorney agreed to discuss the case offline.  There was an apparent homeless man there with his backpack and the judge commented that he looked much better than the last time she saw him.  One women fairly new in the process was asked to bring her medical marijuana card up and the judge had her tear it up, she commented "That was a waste of 200 dollars."  She commented that it was a relief not to have that temptation in her wallet any longer.

I am hopeful but guarded that Ryan will choose long term sobriety. I know he does not want to be in jail.  I am pleased to know that there is a program like this in our community.  The rest is up to him.