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.