DRUG, ALCOHOL ABUSE AMONG MAJOR FACTORS IN CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

Drug and alcohol abuse have devastating physical effects for abuser
and equally devastating effects on American communities.

"I would be willing to bet 90 percent of crime can be linked back
directly to drug or alcohol abuse," said Rusk County Sheriff's Office
Lt. Johnny Davidson. "A lot of our homicides here in Rusk County have
involved narcotics; a lot of assaults have to do with the family
being home and someone splurged on drugs or alcohol. Almost all of
the break-ins can be linked to drug use - people stealing to support
their habit." The state legislature has taken steps in recent years
to strengthen punishments for drug and alcohol offenses in an attempt
to curb the problem.

Classifications for drinking while intoxicated have been considerably
toughened, going so far as to make a first offense of driving while
intoxicated (DWI) a felony if there is a child under the age of 15 in
the car at the time of the offense. "In the past, we would work with
them and work with them," said Rusk County District Attorney Micheal
Jimerson. "The Legislature made this very serious on purpose."

Offenders caught with any amount of narcotics can be charged with a felony.

"If you get caught with any amount of methamphetamines, even an
amount you can't see, it's a felony on the first offense," Jimerson
pointed out. "We can take the residue in an empty bag and flush that
out with acid, what we've started calling an 'empty bag' case. Most
of the drugs you think of as illegal are all felonies the first time
you're caught with them."

Jimerson said he would not argue with the statement that up to 85 or
90 percent of crime is committed by drug users but, he said, if he
could wave a magic wand and eliminate drug abuse overnight, the crime
rate would not go down 85 or 90 percent.

"You're still going to have the same people doing bad things - they
just won't be using drugs, they'll be doing something else," he said.
"My take on it is, I don't like for it to give rise to the idea,
'It's all the fault of drugs.' It's not, in my opinion. One of the
hardest things I have getting people to see is there's just a lot of
bad, bad people in the world that do bad, bad, evil things. And it
happens that those bad, bad criminals use drugs. I don't believe that
the drugs made them a bad, bad, evil person." Strengthening the
penalties is not necessarily the answer, Jimerson continued.

"If we kept our word as a state and as a nation it might, but we just
don't," he said. "Because most of the time you tell the criminal,
'You're going away for 10 years' and they go away for a year. And
they know how to play the system - the criminal knows more about what
he can get away with in each county than even we do."

Jimerson said he tries to get juries in drug cases to understand they
are not doing the drug user any favors by acquitting him.

"If you acquit and let him walk out that door, you are not doing him
a favor," he said. "He's going to go back to living with that, it's
paramount in his life. Look at those people in Tyler, the kid over
there in that storage building. Wouldn't they have been better off in
a jail? We can take care of them in a way that's humane and put them
in an institution where they have no access to the drugs - where
maybe for the first time in their lives they get to be straight for
just a little while - or we can leave them in that."

Both men agree that if there were an easy answer to the drug problem,
something would have been done by now.

"People who cut people with knives, people who break into people's
houses, people who kill people - I'm just not a believer that
'education' is going to help them," he said. "I'm a real cynic on a
lot of things that we have to be enlightened and education is the key
and treatment is the key, because we've tried all those things. It's
not that I just hate a drug offender and I just want to see him in
jail for 10 years - it's that I would like for everything to stop in
his life, to put him in a place he doesn't have access to drugs and
the people who are leading him down this path don't have access to
him and he doesn't have the access to harm people over it. The only
thing we're going to be able to do to keep them from hurting other
people is put them in a place where they can't get to other people."