KICKING DRUGS: 'A ROCKY ROAD'

Once during Calvin Monceaux's two-year ordeal getting through Mobile
County's Drug Court program, he bought a contraption over the Internet that
he believed could help him scam a drug test.

The rubberized, girdle-like get-up was designed to hold someone else's
drug-free urine. It was also designed to appear, without close inspection,
that he was providing a sample of his own urine as he submitted to the test.

Both Monceaux and the device failed. It wasn't his first time to fail, nor
would it be his last.

More than once, Monceaux, 25, was viewed as a lost cause, various officials
said last week during a Drug Court graduation ceremony at the Mobile County
courthouse.

Among the seven graduates, each of whom was required to stay drug free for
six months in what is typically a yearlong program, it took Monceaux two
years. He gave the class speech. Court police officer Fletcher Rivers
introduced him.

"I've arrested him so many times, I forgot the count," Rivers said. He
described the personable house painter as a man who used his "high
intelligence" to slide away and defeat himself, but who obviously had
something inside worth saving.

Once, Rivers said, as he drove Monceaux to jail, "we were both crying by
the time we reached Metro."

In another season, after Monceaux had bailed out of yet another arrest,
Rivers said, he disappeared. He moved from house to house, five times in
the course of a few months. Rivers, charged with apprehending Monceaux,
said he decided he would "run him until he gets tired."

After getting word that Monceaux had been spotted in a west Mobile mall,
Rivers tracked him down near the Mississippi state line.

Monceaux's physical condition had so deteriorated, Rivers said, "I didn't
recognize him."

It was some time after this, the officer said, that Monceaux -- whose loud
and unmistakable voice could be heard from the other end of a hall --
finally told him what he wanted to hear.

"I knew he was doing well when he said: 'I'm scared,'" Rivers told a group
of family, friends, counselors and court officials at the graduation ceremony.

"We've had many rocky roads," Drug Court Judge Ed Blount Jr. later told the
crowd, referring to Monceaux.

The county's Drug Court program, incorporated nearly a decade ago, is
designed to approach drug abusers with counseling and therapy rather than
incarceration. While required to pay a share of the cost of their
counseling, defendants like those in the small graduation group are
provided with a way out.

With Monceaux, Blount said, he finally lost all faith. It was only because
"others thought otherwise" that his troubling case was given another chance.

"And it worked, thank God," Blount said.

Following his introduction by Rivers, Monceaux admitted to the crowd that
for much of his time in the program, he was deeply submerged in a wide
range of drugs. "I pulled every trick I could" to avoid detection, he said.

He went to jail "over and over."

Once, in a moment of clarity, Monceaux said, he wrote a poem about his
struggle with drug addiction. He said he believed it expressed the
frustrations and burdens of conquering the poison of one's own choices. It
was a good poem, he said, and he was proud of it.

"The next day I got high."

He asked those in the audience, "Don't get frustrated when someone fails
the program" and to remember how difficult it can be. "I pray for those who
didn't make it."

Blount congratulated each graduate. He said that Monceaux, in particular,
"did what I thought was impossible. He struggled mightily."

Monceaux interrupted him from the audience, blurting out: "It took until I
finally decided to just stop."

One of the program's counselors, Bill Dubuisson, told the audience that
conquering addictions is a "mental, spiritual, emotional, social" quest.
Critics of the Drug Court program, who suggest stopping substance abuse is
only a matter of "will power," Dubuisson said, should be told: "Every time
you have a heart attack, use will power.

"It is arrested one day at a time," he said. "Getting them off (drugs) is
one thing. Staying off is another."

The day before the ceremony -- the 41st such graduation in Mobile County
since Drug Court was created -- Blount sat on the bench and reviewed the
cases of more than a dozen defendants who stood before him.

He admonished some for failing to show up for counseling. Others drew his
wrath for lying.

"You're not going to lie," the judge told one defendant. "You're lucky I
don't lock you up."

"Toby, how are you?" Blount greeted another. "Things look good, except for
your payments. I want you to graduate in six months. Are you ready for that
to happen?"

For various infractions, he gave backsliders options of jail time or
community service. In a frustrating moment, Blount uttered: "No one seems
to be taking it seriously."

He informed a defendant that he tested positive for morphine in October.
The judge looked at him: "Is that a revelation to you ... did you use or not?"

The defendant admitted that he "might have" ingested a prescription narcotic.

"People go to jail for not complying," Blount told someone else down the line.

More than 1,400 people have gone through the Drug Court program, according
to its records. Nearly 600 have graduated, meaning they were drug free for
at least six months.

Of that number, Blount said Friday, about 10 percent fell back into drug abuse.

"It's a very small percentage, I can tell you that," Blount said.

District Judge Michael McMaken administered Drug Court until last year when
Blount took over. In its early years, Blount served as McMaken's bailiff.
Following law school, he was one of the attorneys who represented Drug
Court enrollees.

Blount said Friday that despite the frustrations generated by the
defendants' often protracted unwillingness to come to terms with their
addictions, the program has never failed to reveal its value to him.

"These people are not going to prison ... and they have helped themselves,"
Blount said. "They lifted themselves out of a situation that to them was
insurmountable and unmanageable and was leading to nothing but bad things
- -- prison and sometimes death."

Many of the graduates, he said, "have become gainfully employed for the
first time in their lives. They are drug free, they are working, and they
are forming families and they are happy people again.

"They don't need to be locked away," he said of drug abusers.

The latest graduates, Monceaux among them, added their seven names to the
Drug Court's win column.

At the ceremony, with the judge's frustration from the court docket the day
before gone, Blount told the graduates: "I can't tell you what an honor it is."