Robert's Story

I first became aware of Drug Court in 2004. Let me tell you how this occurred.

In 1996, I had begun to see (professionally for medical treatment) a single young man whom I will call Robert (to protect his confidentiality).  He was then age 24, unemployed, and had been into crystal meth for two years.  His mother was at that time very enmeshed with him, rescuing and enabling him, secretly supporting him financially, and letting him live for free in one of her rentals.  From 1996 to 2002, I did seven separate formal interventions on this patient.  I sent his mother to ALANON; helped get his older brother completely out of meth; and had Robert placed into three different inpatient chemical dependency treatment programs and four different halfway or recovery houses as follow-up after-inpatient treatment.  Over those six years I saw him for 118 therapy sessions.  In a word, his family, the Centers to which he went and I all provided competent treatment.  We made all the right moves. Nonetheless, Robert just kept relapsing, started eight different jobs over the six years, losing all of them, and was eventually arrested for writing bad checks on one of his mother's accounts.

Robert then went to County jail and I lost track of him, assuming he would just keep using.  One day in early 2004, I got an announcement that he was getting married.  His letter said he was working full-time, had completed something called "Drug Court," had paid his mother back for all the money he'd taken from her, and was very active, even a leader, in our local Narcotics Anonymous meetings.  I was certainly pleased by this information, yet curious.  I'm a pretty good therapist, and he went to very good treatment centers.  How had this Drug Court program succeeded when other efforts had not?

At the wedding, Robert told me that it was the daily monitoring that was the key to his success.  He was so totally addicted to meth that even a couple days without someone always watching lead to relapse.  Having Police Officers visit him at his apartment, never knowing when he'd have to do a urinalysis, forced him to stay clean long enough that he began to like the idea and his new life style. Robert said he also simply liked the personalities of his drug counselors and Judge Strophy!