Jeff Keeling, Associate Editor
By Jeff Keeling
What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost. (Matthew 18:12-14)
Upon first learning about the early successes of Washington County’s Recovery Drug Court, my thoughts turned to statistics. The annual cost to society of incarcerating people, the risks to our region’s current and future prosperity if too many working-age adults can’t be productive employees because drugs rule their lives – those 30,000-foot-view matters pretty much summed up my line of thinking.
But in considering an article about the program (see page 1), I reached out to its director, Karen Hulsey, hoping I could interview a pending graduate. Then I spent some time Thursday with Alvis, Holly and Cooper Lowe, and boy did my thoughts turn.
Sure, Alvis Lowe’s recovery from drug addiction should help assure a productive future for the bright young man. Likewise for the court’s two other Friday graduates, Joshua Hammer and Dylan Greene. Had the men continued on their pre-Recovery Court trajectories, it’s unlikely they would have continued contributing to the tax base and helping make our community an attractive place for employers to do business.
Rather, their drug dependency had them on a path to prison. They had already committed non-violent misdemeanors. As the Recovery Court’s Karen Hulsey noted Friday, the evidence shows that without help the Lowes, Hammers and Greenes of the world end up escalating in their drug use, and escalating criminally along with that.
More than likely, the misdemeanors would have turned to felonies, and in addition to the property or physical damage they inflicted on the victims of their crimes, the men would have been a financial burden on our society as they sat in overcrowded jails and prisons.
Those are some of the societal costs that our area’s drug addiction problem creates. It is easy, for me at least, to limit my thinking to these more impersonal elements of the problem without taking stock of its more intimate nuances.
Take Alvis Lowe. From everything I could tell spending time around him and his wife, he’s a super nice g