Pubdate: Sun, 11 Sep 2005 Source: Berkshire Eagle, The (Pittsfield, MA) Copyright: 2005 New England Newspapers, Inc. Contact: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/897 Author: Milton Bass Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?217 (Drug-Free Zones) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/david+capeless THE LAW WE HAVE The announcement has been kind of lost among the few other calamities that are plaguing the United States right now, but on Aug. 29 President George W. Bush issued a proclamation stating that September is officially National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month. This year's theme is "Join the Voices for Recovery: Healing Lives, Families and Communities." Being a former alcoholic, George Bush has personal knowledge of the difficulties surrounding dependence on alcohol. Although charges have been made, his drug history is as mysterious as his absence from his National Guard responsibilities, but that is neither here nor there. The U.S. has been conducting a "war" on illegal drugs for several years now, but although billions of dollars have been spent on the battles, the results have been much less than positive. Like Iraq, this is a war that might never have an end unless we may some day announce to the world that we have won it and just not talk about it any more. As with alcohol, drugs bring problems that can cause individuals and families endless grief. Since government statistics indicate that 40.4 percent of Americans aged 12 or older have used marijuana or hashish in their lifetimes and about 2.6 million new users are counted each year, the problems affect everybody in some way or other. The cases that have caught the attention of this community the most in the past year have concerned those families in the Great Barrington area whose children have been arrested for selling marijuana in a school zone. Great Barrington is an interesting town with a mixture of affluence and juvenile wildness that has caused perplexing problems for its residents and its merchants. Troubles keep erupting within its police force and the methods used for so-called law and order. Those who have been reading the stories in the past year about various malfeasances that have taken place in Great Barrington must have wondered about what might have been added to their water supply. Obviously someone in authority in Great Barrington was worried enough about the drug problem among juveniles that the county drug enforcement task force was asked to try to sort it out. An undercover officer was put in place and he was able to buy marijuana from several teenagers in a school zone area. Charges were brought by District Attorney David Capeless and a hoorah ensued when he announced that he was going to enforce the law that was on the books, which meant a two-year mandatory sentence for those found guilty. Parents of the arrested teenagers and sympathizers started a campaign to get the district attorney to forgo the mandatory law and allow lighter sentences including probation and community service. The theme of their diatribe was that the sentence was too harsh for first offenders and it would cast an irremovable stain on their lives. Since most of those arrested come from middle class, white families and have no criminal records, the sympathy engendered has had some impact among parents thinking to themselves, "there but for the grace of God," about their own children. But there are also those who say the law is the law, who feel if it were a minority group they wouldn't have a shot in hell of getting off and if you do the crime, you do the time. Their argument is that if you don't want the law applied, get the Legislature to change the law. This has been going on long enough for me to have pondered many times on the problems of those involved teenagers, parents and law enforcement officials. The closest I have come to this situation was when I was caught amateurishly trying to cheat in a physics exam in high school. Even after all these years I vividly remember the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when the teacher, "Boomer" Lynch, asked out loud "Bass, what have you got written on the palm of your hand?" The zero I received is less than nothing compared to the thought of going to jail for two years, but that one incident cured me of cheating right up to now. So it isn't so much what lessons the accused teenagers can learn from their naive dip into a criminal venture as what will the public take away from it. The letters to the editor in this paper have been filled mostly with arguments by prominent, educated people who are upset by the thought of these young people going to jail for what they regard as a simple, immature mistake in judgment. I was most sympathetic to their points of view for a while but then I got to thinking about what has been happening in this country for the past five years and how many public officials have been getting away with crimes because they have the political power to do so. President George Bush keeps changing the rules on things that don't go right for him or his people and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. And now on a local level we are being asked to change the rules for a group that thought the rules didn't apply to them. It is one thing for someone to be arrested for using marijuana and quite another to be caught selling it in a school zone. Were these teenagers selling the illegal product because they needed the money to feed their own habit or was it just a brazen contempt for the ordinary kids who lead straight lives? Did they think this was cool and what they were doing made them the coolest of the cool? And from whom did they purchase the marijuana? Did they have metropolitan wholesalers who supplied them? Did they cross state lines to purchase their supplies or do we have a wholesale supplier right in the Great Barrington area? The Capeless family has for generations been among the great public servants of Berkshire County and David Capeless stands tall among them. I stand with him in what he decides the best course for the citizens of Berkshire County might be. This particular law might be draconian in its effects, but right now it is the law we have. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin