DRUG COURT GRADUATES DEFEAT ADDICTION - AND BUDGET CUTS, TOO

Statewide spending cuts threatened the drug court program until its members
took up the fight.

Years of personal losses led Kim Simmons to the Roanoke Valley's drug court.

And another potential loss - in the form of state budget cuts - threatened
to take away the program that had helped her turn her life around and kept
her out of jail.

"It was a chaotic situation at the time," Simmons said.

Simmons and other drug court participants didn't buckle. They fought. And
with help from state officials and a Roanoke County circuit judge, their
program survived.

Today, the group will graduate from the program clean and sober and with
records clean of drug felonies.

Retired Circuit Judge Diane Strickland, who was key to bringing the drug
court here and essential to saving it in the spring, said she is proud of
all drug court graduates. But this crop is special, she said.

Not only have they experienced the ramifications of dealing with their
problems, they did so even as they feared they would lose the program that
had helped them so much.

"I have to feel that they had even the greater burden," Strickland said.

Simmons' burdens began with her parents' divorce. She and her mother wound
up in California, where Simmons lost two close friends to suicide in the
early 1990s. By 1995, the teenager was addicted to heroin and cocaine, she
said.

Two failed rehabilitation programs later, Simmons' mother sent her back to
Ironto to live with her father. It worked for a while.

"I had missed Dad," she said. "Moving back here was just a happy place."

Simmons, now 23, got married in 1997. She gave birth to a son in early
1998. The boy was 6 months old when his father died, the victim of a heart
attack at 24. That October, doctors diagnosed Simmons' father with terminal
cancer.

"I started drinking pretty much the day after my husband died," she said.

By early 1999, she was back into cocaine, she said.

An all-day drinking binge with a friend ended with a car crash in May 1999,
near the Montgomery County/Roanoke County line. Roanoke County police found
small amounts of cocaine and marijuana in her purse and charged her later
with felony drug possession.

Her lawyer recommended a drug court plea, which meant that a judge would
supervise her as she participated in addiction treatment, community service
and other programs.

Simmons said she had already quit taking drugs by then. But her resolve was
soon tested. Her father finally lost his struggle with cancer after four years.

"It was in my face," she said. "I had to deal with it."

She turned to her father's strength for inspiration, and stayed clean.

Then came March of this year, when the General Assembly, facing budget
problems with no historical precedent, failed to fund the program.

"It was crazy" to make such cuts, Simmons said.

A Virginia Tech study showed that the program cost $4,390 per participant
in 2000, while confinement cost $22,500 per prisoner.

Drug court participants wrote letters to Gov. Mark Warner and rallied
support. Despite the stress, most of them avoided backsliding, Strickland said.

Warner and legislators restored most of the funding to drug courts
statewide. But in October, Warner announced his own unprecedented round of
spending cuts, trimming $858 million from the state budget in what he said
was only the beginning. Again, state officials found a way, Strickland said.

The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services directed federal grant
money to drug courts, including $105,000 for the Roanoke Valley program,
which required a $35,000 match. The match came from Blue Ridge Behavioral
Healthcare, drug court official Ward West said.

The same federal grant appears to be saving Virginia CARES, a Roanoke-based
program that helps parolees adjust to life after prison, said Dan Catley of
criminal justice services. Under the budget cuts, state support of Virginia
CARES would have ended Dec. 31.

The four-year grant will require an ever-increasing local match for both
programs - 75 percent in the final year. By that time, officials hope to
have found other funding sources, West said.

"I am confident," Strickland said. "I think the program has proven its worth."

That's good news for future drug court participants, Simmons said.

"It helps you get to the bottom of why you first started using," she said,
"or why you continue to use."