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Former Judge Linda Davis, who was previously appointed 41B District Judge in 2000, has left that role to become the executive director of Families Against Narcotics. (Photo courtesy of workithealth.com)
HANCOCK – Judge Linda Davis was known for her harsh convictions of people who used drugs. Now a retired district court judge and former Macomb County deputy prosecutor, Davis focused on imprisoning people charged with addiction-related crimes, rather than understanding why people with drug problems were repeat offenders.
“As a prosecutor, I ran our drug unit and I became a judge.” he told LegalNews.com. “I really thought I was doing society a favor by putting people who were using drugs and looking for drugs in prison.”
Davis was appointed to 41B District Court in 2000.
He admitted that while serving as a prosecutor, and later as a judge, he believed that by sentencing people with substance abuse addictions to prison, he was doing society a favor, LegalNews reported on September 5, 2019.
Davis ’harsh views on people with LDS changed when his 17-year-old daughter, a high school student and athlete, suffered a knee injury that required surgery. As prescribed opioid analgesics, they led to their subsequent heroin addiction. One night, Davis heard the words that make all parents’ hearts seem to stop: “Mother, I’m a heroine. I need help. “
Davis told Legal News writer Linda Laderman that she was devastated and embarrassed.
“It was extremely difficult to talk about it at first,” she said “It simply came to our notice then. Before, he still looked at addiction as a moral failure. adding that he did not understand that people could become addicted due to sports injuries and tooth stretching.
While organizing help for his daughter, Davis was asked to attend a town hall meeting on drug addictions. In front of the other attendees, Davis said she saw her parents experiencing the same thing, and for her it was clear that there was a lot of shame and humiliation in the group. Then Davis realized something.
“It was clear that the stigma associated with drug addiction made it difficult to get good viable help for people.” Davis said. “The treatment facilities we called did not show any compassion and did not encourage the possibility of recovery. All of these things made me realize that the system needed to change. “
He realized that he had the capacity and connections to understand that the SOUTH is not a choice, not a moral failure, but a disease.
“We are wasting taxpayers’ dollars by putting them in jail untreated,” she said.
Davis has co-founded the grassroots organization Families Against Narcotics. In March 2007, she left her role as a judge to become the organization’s first executive director.
Fourteen years later, this month, Davis is on the Upper Peninsula, speaking at public engagements, and continues to identify an important aspect of addiction that the general public does not realize or choose to ignore: stigmas only derail the truth. and the education surrounding addiction: something he said is not a moral failure.
Davis told the Daily Mining Gazette Tuesday morning that the stigma is the number 1 block of treatment.
“People (who) suffer from a substance use disorder are self-deprecating” she said. “They hate the decisions they have made; they feel that there is no way out, then, when we embarrass them and make them feel unworthy, because of the stigma around addiction, they often feel that there is no help available, which is totally the wrong message we want to be sending people “.
Davis went on to say that LDS is a treatable disease and “We need to start talking about it as a disease, rather than as a moral failure.”
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