One thing that I learned a while back which was interesting to me is that many of our clients have serious mental health issues and their use or misuse of drugs or alcohol was often a… weird attempt to self-medicate. I got a federal grant back in 1998 I believe, to work with criminal defendants who had developmental disabilities. Pursuant to that, we tried to identify who our clients were, to try a different tact with them. The drug use was often incidental to the mental health issues, but the mental health issues were never getting addressed.

I represented a woman many years ago who was a heroin addict. She had gotten some heroin and shared it with two friends. One of the friends went out really quickly… and… they weren’t sure. They put him in the shower and the other two nodded off. When they woke up, he was dead. She was prosecuted. She had been an addict. She had been in a crazy and abusive relationship with a guy, she had gotten addicted to cocaine, crack-cocaine, she lost her children, became a heroin addict, and was convicted of manslaughter. The maximum for manslaughter is 15 years. I actually got her on appeal and was kind of outraged by it and I was able to settle the case and get her into residential treatment. When I last heard, she was doing well and trying to re-establish contact with her children.

If you criminalize people who are all doing drugs together, nobody wants to call the ambulance quickly. You are losing lives because of the desire of the criminal justice system to blame somebody. All three of those people were addicts, they all did the same amount, one of them OD’d. That would be something I would love to see change. I think we could save lives. That’s an example of the kind of cases that we have.

Once heroin bloomed in Vermont, we were desperately trying to get treatment for people, and there wasn’t any. So we started sending people across the border to New York…