GETTING CONVICTED: THE PENALTY BOX

GETTING CONVICTED: THE PENALTY BOX

The penalty laws of most states and countries are built on a series of leg­islative acts that happened over a long period of time, and thus, they are complicated and not easily summarized. Possession of modest amounts of marijuana can result in a slap on the wrist in some places and serious jail time in others. The same is true for other drugs, although they are usually taken more seriously, even in very small amounts. Often the prosecuting attorney has some leeway about the level of crime with which to charge an individual. The problem is that it is difficult to be sure of (1) the latest changes in the law, (2) the attitude that the prosecu­tor is taking toward drug crimes, and (3) whether that individual will be charged under state or federal statutes. Thus, conviction for the posses­sion of a small, recreational amount of heroin or cocaine could result in either a modest sentence or a huge fine and a long prison term, depend‑

ing on the exact circumstances and the mood of the legal officials over­seeing the case.

It is important to recall that in some states and in the federal system there is structured, or guideline, sentencing. That means that once an individual is convicted of some drug crimes, the sentence is regulated by law and might not be alterable by the judge no matter what the circum­stances. Coupled with the fact that there is no parole in the federal system (and increasingly in the state systems), a conviction can mean long prison time, even if the prosecutor and judge wish it were otherwise.

Here's an example of how things can go terribly wrong as a conse­quence of alcohol, a prescription drug, and harsh laws. One of us (WW) testifies as an expert in legal cases, and a recent one illustrates how the law, the prosecutor, and the courts can interact to ruin the life of an indi­vidual. A man was at a party with his neighbors outside of his home. He consumed a modest amount of alcohol throughout the evening, but at some point he decided to go to bed and took his nightly medicine, which included the sleeping pill zolpidem (generic for Ambien). Before going to bed, he came back to the party but soon appeared intoxicated. He then prepared for bed and went to sleep. Shortly thereafter, he awoke and came out of the house without his shoes, false teeth, or hearing aid, clearly hav­ing just awakened. But he had a gun, which he had retrieved from his bedside where he kept it. He fired twice as he yelled an obscenity to the individuals at the party. No one was hurt. The police were called, and he was arrested.

The man was charged with aggravated assault, and everyone thought he was intoxicated with alcohol. In the law of most states, that is consid­ered "voluntary intoxication" and thus is not a defense against any charges. His defense team argued that he was not intoxicated with alco­hol, but with his prescribed zolpidem, which is known to produce odd behaviors such as sleep driving, sleep sex, sleep shopping, sleep eating, and so forth. If it were the zolpidem, that would be "involuntary intoxica­tion," and that is a defense against such charges.

The jury heard the case and decided that he was intoxicated by alcohol and was therefore guilty. Now, here is where the disaster occurred. In that state, commission of many crimes (such as aggravated assault) with a gun is a mandatory ten-year sentence. If the gun is fired, the mandatory sen­tence is twenty years. In this case the prosecutor chose to charge the man for each of the six people present at the party, and the law requires that the mandatory sentences apply to each charge and be served consecu­tively. This means the man (who has not been sentenced at this writing)

must, by law, be sentenced to 120 years in prison. The judge has no discre­tion in this case.

This is a terrible example of the interaction of intoxication, harsh laws, vigorous prosecution, and finally, the presence of a gun where a sleepy, intoxicated person could access it and fire it. This man had no history of behavior like this and was a decorated soldier. It is very likely that the zolpidem produced the bizarre behavior, but the prosecutor and jury did not see it that way.

The lesson from this is that if a person chooses to intoxicate himself and then commits a crime, that intoxication is usually not a defense against any crime he committed, no matter how impaired he was at the time of the crime.

GETTING CAUGHT

GETTING CAUGHT

Most people believe that they will not get caught. Teenagers, in particular, have the feeling that they are "beyond the law" But it does happen. It hap­pens to grandmothers, teenagers, lawyers, doctors, and the most ordinary people on the face of the earth.

Many drug arrests come from the most random events imaginable. In Virginia, an officer stopped a car for having something hanging off the rearview mirror. He became suspicious, legally searched the car, and found major quantities of cocaine. Another drug transporter thought he had the perfect scheme and filled fruit juice cans with cocaine, then resealed them. It is a regular practice for tourists to bring back food from vacation in the Caribbean, and he expected to walk right through customs. What he did not realize was that customs officials knew there was no reason to bring

canned fruit juice from the Caribbean, where it is expensive, to the United States, where it is cheap. He was arrested and convicted for transporting millions of dollars' worth of cocaine.

Even grandmothers are not immune to arrest. A pair of DEA agents working a bus station in North Carolina noticed an elderly woman behav­ing oddly. When they approached her, she moved away and they became suspicious. They conducted a legal search and found a large quantity of cocaine in her luggage.

A college student came back to her dorm room to find the place crawl­ing with campus and city police. While she had absolutely no role in any illegal activity, a friend of her roommate had come to town from another college with a shipment of drugs. Another student, obeying the honor code, had called the campus police. Fortunately, the innocent student was not arrested because the roommate cleared her, but it was a very close call.

The law-enforcement community is actually quite sophisticated in its drug-enforcement efforts. DEA agents work all over the world trying to prevent the transport of drugs into the United States. They have agents working major and minor airports, and even bus stations. The highway patrols of most states have drug interdiction units looking for suspi­cious vehicles. This is not a trivial effort, and it results in so many con­victions that both the state and federal prison populations have grown dramatically.

Yet everyone realizes that most countries are overrun with drugs. It is usually easy to buy the most common illegal drugs in many areas of cit­ies and on college campuses. So why is the legal interdiction effort per­ceived as failing? It is not exactly failing, but rather it is being overwhelmed. Many, many people are caught in the legal system, but there is always someone else to replace each person caught. Routine usage of cocaine, crack, or heroin can be a very expensive habit, and the only way that most people can maintain such expensive behavior is to turn to dealing. As we say elsewhere in this book, cocaine and opiates can be extremely reinforcing, and they are also expensive in the quanti­ties that habitual users consume. The combination of dependence and expense often leads users to become dealers until they are stopped by medical intervention, arrest, or death.

What does this have to do with the average reader of this book? Any­one who can read this book no doubt has the ability to do honest and legal work and have a successful life. Such a reader might feel that she is above being caught, or just not in the "wrong" circle of friends. This

naiveté might be the most dangerous attitude of all, because, like most jobs, illegal drug dealing depends on knowledge, skills, and having a network of people. Most casual dealers do not have the knowledge or, fortunately, are not willing to do what is necessary to involve themselves fully in the drug culture. Thus, they approach the whole issue as ama­teurs, and like many amateurs in anything, they fail miserably. Only in this case, the stakes are much higher. They can get caught, lose a lot of

money, become victims of criminal violence, or become heavily depen­dent on the substance they are dealing.

As we all know, some people think they have few opportunities and only a short time to live. They will deal drugs no matter what anyone says. In their lives they see jail time as just the cost of doing business. However, a district attorney who has prosecuted thousands of drug cases had just one bit of advice: people with families, an opportunity for education, and a supportive network of friends have so much to lose from being on the wrong side of the legal system that they should never become involved with it. A felony conviction can strip a person of so many opportunities in this society and can cost families so much in

pain, suffering, and financial loss that no amount of money or drug experience is worth the risk.

Children Of Alcoholic Parents

            CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

By far, alcohol is the drug used most often by high school students. Although most seniors cannot buy alcohol legally, 80 percent of them have tried alcohol and about one in five report that they have drunk heav­ily (more than five drinks in a row) in the past two weeks. This is actually good news, because the number of teens drinking heavily has declined somewhat in recent years. But that's not the end of the story. Recent stud­ies show that among students who engaged in heavy drinking, half had consumed ten or more drinks in one episode and a quarter had consumed fifteen. So, while heavy drinking at the "low" end of the scale (about five drinks in an episode) has declined recently, the rates of extreme heavy drinking have remained high.

The story among college students is not as simple as the media sometimes portray. Reports of "binge drinking" among college students can be mis­leading. First, the term hinge drinking is a bad one. Many people think of an alcohol binge as a period of several days during which a person stays drunk nearly all the time. This, of course, is a very dangerous pattern of drinking but is not what is meant by the media when they report on binge drinking among college students. In that context, binge drinking refers to a man haying five or more drinks in one sitting or a woman having four or more—clearly enough to put a person at risk for trouble, but hardly a binge in the traditional sense. We prefer to think of the four- or five-drink level as "high-risk drinking"—a more descriptive term. About 40 percent of college stu­dents report this level of high-risk drinking in the past two weeks, but there are also a significant number of college students who don't drink at all—about 20 to 25 percent depending upon the college. So it's important for students to know that, while a lot of students drink, not everybody on campus gets drunk every weekend, and a solid number of students don't drink at all. Still, there are often negative consequences for those who do. Nearly 600,000 college students suffer unintentional alcohol-related inju­ries each year, and more than 1,800 die from those injuries. In addition, 25 percent of college students report negative academic consequences related to their drinking each year, and more than 150,000 develop a health prob­lem related to alcohol use. Clearly, college drinking remains highly preva­lent and continues to take a toll on students' lives.

The problems associated with underage drinking are well known, and in recent years research has continued to show that alcohol affects the brain of younger people very differently from the way it affects that of adults. Part of this may be related to brain development. For example, we know that the brain does not finish developing until a person is in his midtwenties and that one of the last regions to mature is the frontal lobe area, which is intimately involved with the ability to plan and make com­plex judgments. Young brains also have rich resources for acquiring new memories and seem to be "built to learn." It is no accident that people in our society are educated during their early years, when they have more capacity for memory and learning. However, with this greater memory capacity come additional risks associated with the use of alcohol. Studies using animals have shown that when the brain is young, it is more sus­ceptible to some of the dangerous effects of alcohol, especially on learn­ing and memory function. And one study in humans showed that people in their early twenties were more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol on learning than were people just a few years older, in their late twenties. So it appears that children and adolescents who drink are powerfully impairing the brain functions on which they rely so heavily for learning. This is already indicated by very detailed cellular studies on learning-re­lated brain regions. In these studies (which, of course, can only be done using brain tissue from animals), it is clear that alcohol decreases the ability of brain circuits to change in the ways they must for learning to  basic cellular functioning occur far more strongly when the alcohol expo‑sure occurs during adolescence, compared to adulthood. In other words,it appears that adolescence is not only a time when single doses of alcohol affect the brain differently but also a time of enhanced vulnerability to the long-term effects of repeated alcohol exposure—even down to the level of individual brain cells. This adds to a strong and growing scientific literature that tells us that adolescents should hold off on drinking.

Another very good reason for teens to hold off on drinking is that there is a very strong relationship between the age at which one starts to drink and the likelihood of developing dependence on alcohol. People who start

drinking in their early to midteens are far more likely to develop alcohol

dependency, and to experience recurring episodes of dependency, than

are people who start drinking at age twenty-one or older. There are cer­tainly a number of reasons for this increased risk, and not all of them are biological, but it is clear from animal studies that adolescents develop tol­erance to some of alcohol's effects more rapidly than adults. In humans this could lead to a greater motivation to drink repeatedly. So, although it has always been controversial, our current state laws requiring a person to be twenty-one to drink make good sense from this perspective.

Most parents tend to be clueless when it comes to their children's drinking. For example, while 52 percent of tenth graders report having drunk alcohol in the past year, only 10 percent of parents of tenth graders believe that their child has consumed alcohol in that period. Interestingly, parents report believing that about 60 percent of tenth graders have con­sumed alcohol within the past year. So parents actually tend to overesti­mate the proportion of kids who drink—they just don't think it's their kids who are drinking! There are similar gaps between older teens' reported drinking and parents' beliefs about their drinking. Parents of twelfth graders are starting to see the light, but they still underestimate their kids' drinking significantly. The important message for parents is that alcohol is out there and its use is getting thrust at their children from many angles. Talk to your children about them.

WİLKİE WİLSON