DRUG COURT HAS PROBLEMS

I read with much interest the Wheels in motion for local drug court in the
Monday, July 2, issue of the Idaho State Journal. I have several questions
to which answers would be nice.

1. Where are all the addicts in southeastern Idaho area coming from?
Surely, they could not be coming from the school system where we have had
the DARE program now for 10 or 15 years. Everyone there just says no! The
addicts must be the new move-ins from somewhere else. We need to stop them
from moving in from that somewhere else.

2. What is another level of court bureaucracy going to do that the present
court system has not been able to do? Maybe some of our judicial system's
hired help should spend a little more time in their offices working. We
could hire a consulting firm from out of state to study the situation.

3. Why do judges see the same people in here over and over when drugs are
an insidious motivator to commit crime? After the second time, surely a
judge should suspect they are not going to give it up. How many times have
dealers and meth manufacturers been picked up a second time for doing the
same thing while awaiting a decision on the first charge?

4. What are the drug addicts' problems that, through treatment, will be
overcome? Do not most people have problems to overcome? We all probably
need some kind of program to help us overcome our problems.

5. How is this program going to provide a real chance to change people's
lives? Will it eliminate the desire for the drugs? It sounds like it will
take a real army to test and watch and coordinate.

6. Do we still continue to treat the disease because it is impossible to
eliminate the source of the infection? As I asked at the beginning, where
are all of these addicts coming from?

Finally - let's set this program up so judges and lawyers aren't paid
before the addictions are eliminated and the addict becomes the model
citizen of the community. I wonder: What change would that make in the program?

David Andersen,

Pocatello