My Girlfriend Whose Dad Caught Us Smoking Weed When We Were Teens Is Now A Judge

DEAR ERIC: When I was 16, over 50 years ago, I had a girlfriend who lived in a neighboring town. One day I brought a marijuana joint when she visited. While her parents were away, we smoked it in their garage. Suddenly, we heard a car pull up and stop. Her father, a police officer, and her pastor got in.

That is, they were all the same person. His father was the chaplain of the police station. He smelled the smoke, took me to the police station, then to the bus station, and told me never to come back to their town. I didn’t.

I exchanged a card with the girl a few months later, without really expressing anything other than vague regret.

Today, 50 years later, I found her name in the local newspaper and she is a county judge!

I struggled with alcohol and drugs for a while in my youth, but at 36 I managed to get clean and sober – thanks in part to a suspended DUI conviction – and I still am. I was wondering if it would be appropriate for me to write her a message to let her know about this and express my hope that the consequences of our mistake will not be too dire for her and her family.

– Amendments too late?

DEAR AMENDS: Congratulations on your decades of sobriety. I am glad that you have found solutions that work for you and that continue to have a positive impact on your life. I think your ex-girlfriend, the judge, would be happy to hear about it as well. An unexpected note from someone from the past who asks for nothing could be a welcome and happy surprise.

Reparations are not about changing what happened, but rather about improving future possibilities. To do this, we acknowledge the harm that was done and work to repair what we can. So don’t beat yourself up too much about what happened. You may be thinking about the incident through the prism of all the other substance use missteps you’ve made in the past.

Bringing the joint to her house wasn’t the best strategic choice given the one-man criminal justice system under her roof, but it may have taken on an outsized importance in your mind over the years.

Telling him the next chapters of your story and making amends could then have a positive and balancing effect on both of you.

One would hope that as a judge, she would be familiar with the effectiveness of alternative sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses. In particular, drug treatment through drug courts, followed by aftercare, has been shown to have a 38 to 50 percent lower recidivism rate than incarceration for drug offenses, according to the Stanford Network on Drug Policy.

Your story can help put a human face on the problem of drug addiction. It’s something she could come back to as she looks at the law, the numbers, and the cases before her. Your story has the power to change many more lives than you think.

(Send your questions to R. Eric Thomas at [email protected] or PO Box 22474, Philadelphia, PA 19110. Follow him on Instagram and sign up for his weekly newsletter at rericthomas.com.)