Administrators of the Frederick County Drug Treatment Court program said they are opposed to the recent decriminalization of marijuana in Maryland, fearing the message it sends and the effects on young people.
About 75 percent of participants in the program have used marijuana, said program coordinator Paul Wolford.
“It’s a gateway, what people first started using,” he said.
Wolford said he fears that marijuana causes delays in brain development, as the frontal lobe is not developed until the early to mid-20s.
“My biggest fear for relaxation of marijuana laws is the dumbing down of a generation of good people,” he said. “It’s not a risk I’m comfortable taking, but I don’t make the policy.”
Mickey Stenger, the resource specialist for the drug court, said he thinks decriminalization will affect the program and crime in a negative way.
“Marijuana was already accessible, now it’s even worse,” he said.
He referred to the fact that almost every person that’s gone through Drug Court began using drugs through marijuana and said that now this trend would be supported by the legislation.
While Wolford is against the recent decriminalization of marijuana in Maryland and the “relaxation of marijuana laws,” he said he doesn’t think it will affect Drug Court.
“Someone caught with a lesser amount is not going to be in the program to begin with,” he said. “However, the participants are going to have to understand that it’s illegal for them, period.”
Colleen Swanson, the assistant State’s Attorney in the Circuit Court Narcotics Division, disagreed, saying that the marijuana legislation will make things difficult for Drug Court.
“It provides them with the idea that, oh, it’s legal, maybe I can use it, and they can’t be using substances in the program,” she said.
Drug Court is a treatment program designed for repeat offenders or probation violators charged with misdemeanors or felonies for committing non-violent crimes and facing at least five years of jail, Wolford said. For completion of the program, participants may get their sentence suspended or shortened.
Most participants are convicted with a non-violent crime that “stems from their substance abuse,” Wolford said. Those caught with the lesser amount decriminalized by recent legislature would not have enough to form a drug habit from marijuana, he said. Also, participants would have to be repeat offenders, and possessing small amounts of marijuana, or even doing marijuana alone, would not make an offense serious enough to get them into the program.
Some participants face drug charges, some face possession with intent to distribute charges, but there are no drug dealers, Wolford said. Generally, the crimes are thefts or break-ins which participants committed in order to finance their drug habits. The other type of crime is second-degree assaults, assaults that aren’t violent and that happen as a result the offender being drunk or high.
Drug Court has the mission “to get the people from where they are in the criminal justice system to be healthy, productive, taxpaying citizens of Frederick County,” Wolford said.
The program is tailored to each participant’s needs, but treatment usually lasts around 15 months.
The typical day of a Drug Court participant depends on which stage of the program he or she is currently undergoing, he said. All participants are assigned a color to reflect their stage in the program – red, blue, yellow or green. Every morning, they have to call the hotline number provided to them by Wolford and determine whether or not their group is to come in for drug testing that day.
Males undergo an observed urine drug test. Since there are no female workers in the program, females undergo an oral mouth swab drug test, Wolford said.
Participants attend a certain number of self-help meetings such as Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous, the number determined by their phase in the program, he said. In the beginning phase, participants have to attend those meetings every day, which take up a large portion of the day. Most of the participants are in treatment at the Frederick County Health Department, and some have to see a mental health professional.
In the later stages of the program, participants still have to report for testing and treatment, but not as frequently as in the beginning.
In the third phase, Wolford said, “we are trying to mold them into any other member of society, so they are working.”
The Drug Treatment Court program has several agencies involved in decision making for the program, including the State’s Attorney’s Office. Swanson said the staff, including her, the judge and workers from the Public Defender’s Office, meets before court every week to discuss the progress and the problems of each participant. They discuss their sanctions in case of problems.
“We don’t entirely lose the enforcement hat,” she said.
The program has been running in Frederick County since 2005, and has had 194 participants over the years. Currently, there are 44 participants. The race demographic resembles the constitution of the community, Wolford said. The ages of the participants have ranged from 19 to 65, and about 70 percent of the participants are male.
The program is “very successful,” Wolford said, with 70 percent of participants completing the program. That 70 percent is able to stop using drugs and complete all of the steps outlined by the Drug Court program.
Graduates of the program are monitored for at least a year. Of those 70 percent completing the program, only 13 percent will use drugs or commit a crime again. This is a lot less than regular probation, after which 60 percent of people fall back into drug use or crime, Wolford said.
He said that when he interviews participants about their drug of choice, the drugs they have used and the first drug used, at least 75 percent of people will respond marijuana. One person currently in the program drank at 7 years old, smoked marijuana at 11 and shot heroin at 15, Wolford said.
“Many started smoking weed at 13,” he said.
While drug court administrators do not approve its recent decriminalization in Maryland, Stenger said he would support medical marijuana in certain cases, like for cancer patients, but not making it more accessible as pain killers, for example.
He said: “I don’t want to see it legalized, that would be one of the biggest mistakes. Denver has marijuana snacks in vending machines and businesses with marijuana food. To me that is just unbelievable. I think we’re going down a slippery slope that’s only going to get worse.”