LIVING FREE AGAIN

New Clean And Sober Class Passes Through Pike Drug Court

Drug court, which got its start in Judge Keith Starrett's Magnolia
courtroom five years ago, saw its latest batch of successful
participants graduate from the rigorous multi-level program Monday
morning amid tears and cheers.

Twenty-one individuals were given a second chance on a clean life,
free from drug and alcohol addiction, completing the strict four-year
program in which participants are drug tested and appear in court
before Starrett regularly.

"Praise God. Praise God. Praise God," John Shupe said as he approached
the podium of the upstairs courtroom in the Pike County courthouse to
receive his certificate. Shupe said he had been in the program five
years.

Fifteen participants moved into the fourth phase of the program, while
34 individuals finished the second phase, considered to be the most
stringent, and moved into phase three.

Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice Jim Smith, "the uncommon man
with the common name," was the featured speaker and he urged the
program's participants to stay the course.

"You stand at a fork in the road. Which fork are you going to take?"
he asked rhetorically pointing out that down one path is a return to
the jailhouse, poverty, despair and misery, while the other road "can
change your life forever."

"Consider what you've been through as a ruggedization," he said.

During the closing of the graduation ceremony, Shupe stood to offer
words of thanks to administrators and encouragement to those still
enrolled in the program.

He quoted from the Bible - Proverbs 13:12: "Hope deferred makes the
heart sick; But desire fulfilled is the tree of life."

"Have hope," Shupe said. "This (graduation) certificate is your tree
of life."

Debbie McCalip, entering her fourth year in the program, provided one
of the more moving moments of the ceremony. She read haltingly,
between tears, from a prepared statement honoring Starrett and the
other drug court administrators.

She said when she first appeared before Judge Starrett in May 2000,
she was a broken woman. Now she is moving forward with her life and
has a three-year-old daughter, which she said she never would have had
without the opportunity to be in the drug court program and straighten
out her life.

Her message to those just entering the program and those with a few
years remaining was simple.

"Please don't get discouraged," she said.

Perseverance seemed to be the order of the day.

"Stay on your toes," Smith said. "There's going to be be all kinds of
temptation out there. ... Don't disappoint your families. Don't
disappoint yourselves."

Monday's graduates bring the total number of individuals who have
completed the drug intervention program to 56. Starrett founded the
drug court in 1999.

Prior to the graduation, Judge John Hudson, a youth court judge in
Adams County who presides over the first juvenile drug court in the
state, presented Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, D-Brookhaven, with am engraved
silver bowl for her efforts in convincing the state Legislature to
create and fund about 30 statewide drug court programs.

"This is the cradle of drug courts, right here in Mississippi," Hudson said.