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Judge shows addicts the future

By GREG HAMILTON
Published August 10, 2005

Sometimes, a picture tells a story better than words ever can. Credit Circuit Judge Ric Howard with putting that truism to work regularly in his courtroom.

As the judge presiding over the felony criminal docket, Howard has had a front-row seat to the devastation that the growing epidemic of methamphetamine use has been wreaking on Citrus County residents. He has seen how this easily acquired and highly addictive drug has ruined users and their loved ones.

Telling addicts the dangers of their chosen vice is usually futile. They know, on whatever functioning level they have left, that meth is killing them. They just cannot, or will not, decide to make the necessary changes to save themselves.

Howard, however, has taken his self-help strategy to a higher level. He employs horrific props in a garish game of show and tell.

Holding up large photographs - typically jail mug shots - of meth users taken at the early and then the later stages of their addiction, Howard tries to shock the defendants by showing them a glimpse of their future if they continue on this destructive path.

The images are gruesome, made all the more so because they are real.

The early photos show relatively healthy individuals facing the jailhouse camera. The people in the second pictures, sometimes taken just a month or so later, are barely recognizable as living beings.

Howard has nicknames for the photos, such as the Time Machine and Face of Living Death. He uses these not to mock the people in the photos but to shock the people in his courtroom.

From the high-grade crystal form that enters the United States illegally to the impure stuff that is being cooked up in local labs using household chemicals - this generation's deadly version of bathtub gin - methamphetamine use is spreading like wildfire across the country.

Rural and semirural communities, such as Citrus, seem particularly susceptible to the lure of this drug, which has been dubbed "hillbilly crack" because of its highly addictive nature.

Citrus County law enforcement is well aware of the presence of meth in the community, and the arrest reports demonstrate their efforts at trying to stem this rising tide. And when they do make an arrest, the defendant sooner or later will face Howard.

Similar to the "Scared Straight" program and others like it that have proved to be successful over the years by taking juvenile delinquents to prison and showing them the direction they are headed, Howard's photo displays aim to provide a wake-up call to the troubled people standing before him.

Has it worked? Has anyone turned his or her life around after viewing these horrible images? No one can say with any certainty because the defendants usually are on their way to incarceration where, presumably, their meth cravings will go unsatisfied.

Howard is under no obligation to go this extra mile to try to save these lives, of course. He could easily just hand down their sentences and move on to the next case.

But as difficult as it may be to believe after seeing some of the photos, these souls still are human beings. Howard is to be commended for remembering that.

[Last modified August 10, 2005, 00:37:16]