NOW SOBER, THE 'POT-SMOKING JUDGE' HELPS OTHERS WITH ADDICTIONS

He remembers the beginning of the end, the long walk home from work
that Halloween evening, the longest two blocks of his life.

"Our neighborhood is a Norman Rockwell painting," Tom Gilbert says.
"We've got front porches and kids and dogs and sidewalks. It's
America, and everybody is getting ready for Halloween, and we're
going to have 500 kids at our door, and Marsha loves Halloween and is
dressed as a witch and there's chili on the stove.

"But I told her I didn't feel well and just went up to bed."

The next day, she would cry at their small round kitchen table when
he told her the news: Someone had seen him smoking dope at a Rolling
Stones concert in Detroit 19 days earlier.

Ford Field is 250 miles from the Traverse City courtroom where he
served as a district court judge. It took more than two weeks for the
couple who had watched him inhale to describe it to friends, who
happened to be court employees, who felt compelled to tell their
supervisors, who finally confronted him.

That long walk home, the beginning of the end, would also become the
beginning of the beginning.

Five and a half years after his 15 minutes of fame as the pot-smoking
judge won him a couple of jokes from Jay Leno, Tom Gilbert is a
recovering alcoholic: sober, chastened and no longer casting judgment
on anyone.

Instead, he embraces those ready to make the changes he did, changes
he might never have made on his own.

No more does he walk to work. Often he flies to distant cities, where
he trains families how to confront loved ones who drink too much.
Almost 51, he still holds court with neighbors and friends on his
front porch -- but instead of drinking beer or a three-shot martini,
he sips Diet Coke with lime, or diet Vernor's.

And, to remind him of the biggest turning point in his life, he keeps
the ticket from that fateful Stones concert, tucked in with a pirated
CD whose tunes came free but for which, he says, "I paid a lot."

"For 19 days," he likes to say, "that was the best concert of my life."

A Love of the Law

Tom Gilbert grew up in a Saginaw family that not only abided by the
law but created and protected it. His grandfather was a prosecuting
attorney and a state senator. His father was a state representative
and a probate and circuit judge.

But Tom, the oldest of three, rebelled.

He went to Michigan Technological University in the UP for, he says,
four reasons. "I wanted to go as far away from home as I could and
still pay in-state tuition. I wanted to ski. I wanted to have sex
with someone other than myself. And I wanted to try marijuana.

"I accomplished all four in my first term."

Four years at Michigan Tech, two more at Central, flailing over his
future, then finally to Cooley Law School, and the comfort and
familiarity of the law.

He worked as an assistant prosecutor in Eaton County and Grand
Traverse County. He quit to become a criminal defense attorney, then,
in 2000 when he was 42, ran for district court judge in Traverse City
and won, campaigning on his experience: He'd done both prosecutorial
and defense work, and had 200 jury trials behind him.

His work paid him $138,272 a year. He loved it from the start, and
thought, "This is the job for me. I'll put my 20 years in and call it good."

He was five years into his second marriage, to Marsha Smith, a
spirited woman who runs Rotary Charities of Traverse City. She had
begun to challenge him about his drinking, especially when he overdid
it in front of her colleagues.

"You're not in college anymore," she told him.

"I challenge you to drink just one," she dared him.

And he thought: "What's the use of that?"

She considered him a "heavy social drinker," but not an alcoholic. "I
thought an alcoholic is your Uncle Joe who sat in his La-Z-Boy and
hid his bottle of vodka between the cushions."

His mother, 77-year-old Mary Lu Gilbert, says she sometimes watched
him drink, remembered the alcoholism of her father and an uncle, and
thought, "Wow." But, "he never acted any different when he was
drinking. He never got mean."

And he never missed a morning on the bench, although some mornings he
felt worse than others.

During a routine exam in 2002, a doctor asked Tom how much he drank
each night. "A couple," Tom told him, figuring if that evasive answer
was good enough for the guys who stood before him on DUI charges, it
was good enough for him.

The doctor persisted: But how much last night?

Tom remembers responding: "Well, when I got home from work, I had a
martini, which I make with three shots. Then I had another. Then I
had a beer, and another beer. Then Marsha and I split a bottle of
wine with dinner."

Whoa! The doctor told him he should have no more than 14 drinks a
week -- and Tom had had almost a week's worth in one evening. Worse,
he'd had no hangover the next morning, a signal that his body had
grown dangerously accustomed to way too much booze.

Just One Joint

Dope, in comparison, was insignificant in Tom's life. Once in a great
while, he'd smoke at a party. But mostly he smoked once a year, at
deer camp, when his buddies from Michigan Tech would gather at his
family's compound near West Branch.

Over three decades, they met annually to celebrate their friendship
and remember their youth, and one buddy would often bring marijuana.

In the fall of 2002, the dates for deer camp were scheduled to
coincide with the Stones concert in Detroit. At Ford Field that Oct.
12, Tom and his buddies, and another group of friends, arrived with
two sets of tickets. Tom deliberately sat away from his buddies,
predicting they'd "get into trouble."

"I figured I could be more discreet," he says.

It wasn't until midway through the concert, when the air was already
thick with marijuana's pungent odor, after five beers had lubricated
him, as the Stones struck up their old hit, "Sympathy for the Devil,"
that Tom pulled a joint from his shirt pocket and lit it.

First, though, he looked around to make sure he didn't see anybody he knew.

He took a puff, then passed it down the aisle. It came back his way,
he took another puff, and passed it in the other direction.

Two puffs. One joint among thousands smoked that evening where, a
Detroit police officer told me back then, nobody was ticketed or
arrested: "There was so much going on there, you couldn't have gotten
everybody."

Tom says now, "Forty thousand pairs of eyes were on Mick Jagger and
the Rolling Stones, but two people weren't getting their money's
worth because they were watching the judge."

A couple from Elk Rapids saw what he did.

Into Treatment

Fifteen days later, still comfy in his job and still hearing the
advice of his doctor in his head, Tom Gilbert decided to try quitting alcohol.

When a neighbor stopped by for a beer after work, Tom chose a diet
pop. The next night, the neighbor stopped by for another beer and
insisted he couldn't drink without Tom having one too.

So he did. But that was his last, on Oct. 28, 2002. He wasn't sure
how long he could make it stick, but three days later, when word
finally reached his court that he'd been seen smoking dope, he was
cornered into sobriety.

The night before the Traverse City Record-Eagle broke the news, he
and Marsha drove to Saginaw to tell Tom's parents.

His mother said: "So this is it," as if she'd seen it coming.

His father said: "I always thought a guy with so many beer cans in
his garage probably shouldn't be a judge."

Addiction specialists convinced him he needed treatment -- long-term,
inpatient treatment.

A few days later, driving west toward the Hazelden drug and alcohol
treatment center in Minnesota, sick to his stomach with grief and
guilt and fear, Tom learned by cell phone that his insurance would
cover none of the $24,000 cost of the 28-day program.

He took out a $15,000 loan, he says, from "the bank of Dad."

And that Thanksgiving, from his room at Hazelden, he called the Elk
Rapids couple to apologize for having put them in an uncomfortable
position. "We thought you hated us," one said. No, he replied. "You
saved my life."

Public Condemnation

He returned to the bench a changed man, he says. Exhilarated, for
one, for having realized, on his 19th day in treatment, that he had a
disease that sometimes made him crazy, and stupid. Later he would say
in a press release: "It allowed me to think that what I did on my own
time and for my own pleasure had nothing to do with my job or who I am."

At first, his cases were limited to those having nothing to do with
intoxicants. But eventually, he was back to seeing DUIs and
pot-possession cases, domestic assaults, shoplifting -- about 80% of
which, he says, involved alcohol or drug abuse.

The Record-Eagle continued its editorial campaign to drive him off
the bench, even commissioning a poll: 62% of respondents said he
should resign. Editorials berated him for "mindlessly breaking the
law he is sworn to uphold," saying he "tarnished the judiciary."
Letter-writers called him "the epitome of hypocrisy" and worse.

He believed his experience, his treatment and his commitment to
sobriety made him a better, more humane judge, but the Michigan
Supreme Court affirmed a recommendation by the Judicial Tenure
Commission to suspend him for six months.

He returned to the bench again in mid-2004. More editorials against
him appeared.

His court reporter began to say, "All rise, Judge Thomas Gilbert,"
leaving out "the honorable."

But he refused to resign -- "I was brought up to finish what you
started." He decided that fall, however, not to seek re-election. He
and Marsha couldn't take any more bruising, and he'd come to see that
his presence on the bench stained its reputation.

No reporters hovered during his last day on the bench, but his wife
came. Afterward she said to him, "Now what was it you liked about that work?"

A New Mission

For Marsha, he had converted to Catholicism. Now he listened to a
call from God.

With help again from the bank of Dad, he returned to school, to
Hazelden, where last year he collected a master's degree in addiction
counseling. On graduation day, his old pot-smoking Michigan Tech
buddies showed up to help him celebrate -- this time, soberly.

In January, he rented a tiny office over a restaurant in Traverse
City and named his company TouchStone Professional Services
(www.touchstonerecovery.net). He aims to create "a culture of
recovery" in the area, encouraging those who need support to get it,
and helping those in recovery with legal issues.

"I'll go anywhere to talk to anyone to say, 'You want to know what an
alcoholic looks like? I'm one. And I've got three messages I will go
to the ends of the Earth to proclaim: Addiction is a disease, no
worse than diabetes. Treatment works. And recovery is possible for
absolutely everybody."

He appealed his insurance company's decision, to no avail, but he
wishes all insurance plans covered treatment for addictions as it
does treatment for other chronic diseases.

In the meantime, he does what he can. He has officiated at about a
dozen interventions: gatherings at which he coaches families ahead of
time on what to say to persuade an addicted loved one to go for help,
that same day.

"I drive them to treatment," he says. "They're usually very quiet."

Locally, he is mentoring an attorney fighting to keep his license. He
has met with priests, offering to help their parishioners. He
intervened in the case of a 22-year-old alcoholic accused of several
felonies, talking with the prosecutor and the defense attorney to
work out a 90-day jail term instead of prison. "And," he says, "I
will be part of how he re-enters home life when he gets out of jail."

This summer, he will help train residents at Munson Medical Center in
Traverse City to recognize addiction in their patients and take steps
to help them toward recovery.

His debts to Dad are paid off.

He and Marsha have largely abandoned the media, TV and newspapers.

"We watch the Tigers and the weather," he says. In the morning they
sit together on the sofa to pray and read spiritual reflections aloud.

He's more thoughtful, his wife says, and less impulsive. His mother
says he treats his sisters better, initiating calls in a way he never
did, remembering their kids' birthdays.

She still identifies herself to strangers as "the mother of that
pot-smoking judge."

"They all know who I'm talking about," Mary Lu Gilbert says. "I was
embarrassed at first, but not anymore.

"Now when I tell people, I also say that I want them to know he
hasn't had a thing to drink in five years, that he went back to
school, that he's doing good."

In his basement, in a garment bag, hang his black robes. He can't say
why he keeps them, but they come in handy.

He'll wear a robe this fall when he officiates at the marriage in
Paris of a friend he met in graduate school at Hazelden.

And Marsha wore one for Halloween.